OWEN, WILLIAM FITZWILLIAM

NAMESAKE OF THE CITY OF OWEN SOUND

Naval officer, surveyor, landowner, politician, author, justice of the peace, and judge; b. 17 Sept. 1774 in Manchester, England, son of Captain William Owen* and perhaps Sarah Haslam; m. first January 1818 Martha Evans “of Bedfordshire,” and they had two daughters; m. secondly 11 Dec. 1852 Amy Nicholson, née Vernon, in Saint John, N.B.; d. there 3 Nov. 1857.

Little of the future importance of William Fitz William Owen was to be noted in the first 30 years of his life. Illegitimate and orphaned at the age of four, he was boarded in foster homes in north Wales and knew nothing of family life and affection. However, he was an able scholar, best in mathematics and languages. His father’s friend Sir Thomas Rich kept an eye on both Owen and his elder brother, Edward Campbell Rich Owen, and was their patron, introducing them into naval service. William embarked at 13 in Rich’s ship, Culloden, and from that time shipboard was his universe. On shore and in civilian society he was, throughout his life, eccentric and out of his element. As midshipman he specialized in navigation and was latterly assistant master. Self-willed and boisterous, he was twice reduced to able seaman as a matter of discipline. Passing his Navy Board examination on 6 March 1794, he was appointed lieutenant on 24 October but tangled with his captain, was court-martialled at Cape Town (South Africa), and was dismissed from the service on 25 June 1795. The influence of his patrons was sufficient to bring him again into the service, for he was a midshipman in the London during the Spithead naval mutiny in May 1797. His reputation as a hard disciplinarian was already established: he was singled out by the mutineers as “too hard” and was confined in irons in the hold until he escaped with other officers. He was commissioned lieutenant a second time on 12 June 1797, commanding the gun vessel Flamer, and saw service under Lord Nelson in the English Channel till 1803.

Owen began to emerge as a seasoned naval commander of unusual energy and ability during the nine years of war service in the Indian Ocean that began in March 1804 on the Seaflower. He commanded in battle, led naval assault landing parties, and piloted fleets into action through uncharted waters. Captured with the Seaflower by the French southwest of Sumatra, he spent 21 months as a prisoner-of-war on Mauritius, during which time he was promoted commander. Following his release, he was quartermaster general in charge of loading troops and equipment for the British assault on Mauritius in October 1810 and the following May was promoted post captain.

Captain Owen had also begun to show evidence of his assurance in the art and science of naval surveying during his service in the Indian Ocean. Beginning in 1806 he completed a number of projections of ships’ tracks and manuscript charts. Although some writers have speculated that Owen learned the intricacies of naval surveying from Captain Matthew Flinders, the surveyor of the Australian coasts and a fellow prisoner on Mauritius, neither man made any reference to such collaboration. Owen’s independent interest in surveying and his self-confidence were written into the log of the Seaflower on 7 Aug. 1807 as he meditated on the surveying methods of East India Company officers on the China coasts: “Give me my health, a Blue Coat Boy, a Boat of 70 tons, Twenty Men & a Cockle Shell Jolly Boat & I would do it all whilst they are preparing for it.” On returning to England in 1813, Owen kept in touch with the hydrographic office of the Admiralty. In the following year it published his translation of Marino Miguel Franzini’s book describing the coasts of Portugal.

Owen’s first appointment specifically as a surveyor was to duty in the Canadas from May 1815 to August 1817 to act as an assistant to his brother. His Canadian service fell into two periods: a first rapid reconnaissance in the summer of 1815 to determine a number of urgently needed facts, followed by deliberate scientific surveying of the St Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. While crossing the Atlantic he began an “astronomical journal” which eventually contained the longitude and latitude of significant locations along the Canadian waterway from Quebec City to Penetanguishene on Georgian Bay. These fixed points set the general frame of the surveying that followed.

During his first summer in Upper Canada, Owen accomplished a number of urgent tasks. He confirmed the survey work already under way on Lake Ontario and the Grand River and examined both the mouth of the latter and the bay within Turkey Point in search of an appropriate site for a naval base. The international boundary at Saint-Régis near Cornwall was located and extensive soundings were taken in the Detroit River to provide data about the several channels which would be used in establishing the international boundary there. As well as a running survey of the north shore of Lake Erie, Owen began another of the east shore of Lake Huron and of Georgian Bay to near present-day Victoria Harbour: in the latter survey, land forms, timber resources, and navigational hazards were observed and again the site for a naval base was sought. The survey was hindered throughout the late summer when Captain Owen and his staff suffered from fever. A further hindrance arose from the heated tensions between British and Americans on the Detroit frontier. Lieutenant Alexander Thomas Emeric Vidal, a principal surveying officer under Owen, was arrested and detained at Detroit, which gave rise to time-consuming negotiations and protracted correspondence between British and American authorities. Yet the summer’s work yielded a wealth of new understanding of virtually unknown shores.

Orders for the deliberate systematic survey of the St Lawrence River and lower Great Lakes were issued at Kingston on 5 Nov. 1815, envisaging work first in the region close to Kingston, and then in the upper lakes; time permitting, the frontier waters of Lake Champlain were to follow. The survey began on 1 Feb. 1816 with Captain Owen personally leading 7 officers and some 50 seamen and marines out onto the ice about the Thousand Islands to measure survey baselines. In the following 69 days about 300 miles of baseline were surveyed in an area 80 by 30 miles, with some 10,000 angles and bearings being recorded. Owen believed the accuracy could not “err two inches in a mile.” This episode, the beginning of accurate naval surveying in Canada, was typical of Owen, and his report breathes energy: in weather that reached –20°F, work took place “every day successively except the Sabbath from Eight O’Clock in the morning to six at night.” Yet there were special pay, extra clothing, and double rum rations for the men. Thus a formidable surveying problem was solved while the naval garrison was relieved from the tedium of winter routine. Months later the Navy Board criticized the method of accounting, questioning the extra expenditure of £144 18s. for wages and the further item of £96 5s. for four horses “to replace those which were lost” in the river: Captain Owen had nearly drowned on the first day when the teams went through the ice.

A stone house in Kingston became the hydrographic office, supplying quarters for the officers of the survey, facilities for projecting their work, and a place for consultation and instruction. John Harris’s young bride, Amelia [Ryerse*], lived there and breathed a special note of domesticity into their society, remembered fondly in the correspondence of the officers in later years. This experience probably prompted the captain to marry soon after returning to England. Through the spring and summer of 1816 the surveying progressed until Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River to near Prescott were completed. Early in 1817 the Niagara River was surveyed. On 14 June Lake Erie lay before the surveyors when the establishment was closed down as a matter of peace-time economy. Lieutenant Henry Wolsey Bayfield*, who had first learned surveying on the ice in February 1816 under Owen’s instruction, was left to complete the work when Owen returned to England in June 1817.

Captain Owen had also borne the considerable weight of day-by-day naval administration from 26 Oct. 1815 to 31 May 1816 when he was the senior naval officer on the Canadian lakes in the absence of both the commander-in-chief and the navy commissioner. Beyond administrative detail and the direction of surveying, he continued to deal with the overriding problems of strategic planning. He reported at length on the siting of naval bases above Niagara and lines of communication which would be secure in time of war. Surveying the western shores of Lake Ontario and the Grand River led to speculation about a route from Burlington Bay (Hamilton Harbour) to the Grand River and Lake Erie. He also reported at length on possible improvements in the established route between York (Toronto) and Lake Huron by way of the Nottawasaga River. In May and early June 1817 he traversed the Trent–Severn water route with a small party and Indian guides but found it less practicable because of the need for expensive works. He had laboured with great energy and insight and his findings helped in the understanding of numerous key geographical situations which had been unclear until that time. The 27 months of Canadian service had established him as a master of surveying and his work founded scientific hydrography in Canada.

Owen is best known for his surveys of the coasts of Africa in the years 1822–26. Sent to survey eastward from the Cape of Good Hope, he had his orders enlarged from time to time until his expedition had charted the entire east coast of Africa as well as southern Arabia, Madagascar, and several island groups in the Indian Ocean. On the return to England, long stretches of the west coast of Africa were examined and the Gambia River was carefully surveyed. In all, some 30,000 miles of coast were recorded and a chain of longitudinal distances extending from the British Isles to Bombay was established. The magnitude of the achievement placed Owen among the greatest British naval surveyors.

The expedition had, however, suffered staggering losses from tropical fever beginning in November 1822, which caught public attention and partly obscured the achievement in surveying. Captain Owen registered a ringing denunciation of medical practice to the Admiralty, rehearsing the uselessness of “copious bleeding” and “large doses of Calomel.” In 1829, on the west coast of Africa, fever was again to dog his service. On the death of his surgeons he assumed control of treatment: by avoiding bleeding and energetic treatments, prescribing a purgative, rest, and fresh air, and administering quinine on remission, he proved to be well ahead of his time.

Owen’s attention was not confined to surveying. He and his officers were appalled by the ravages of the slave trade and their testimony fuelled the anti-slavery movement in England led by Thomas Fowell Buxton. In two instances involving territories where political control was in dispute, Delagoa Bay (Mozambique) and Mombasa (Kenya), Owen accepted the temporary cession of the areas, pending his government’s final decision. Although in both cases his arrangements were never made official, his actions were the basis for British claims in east Africa late in the century.

Hardly had the first expedition been paid off when Owen returned to Africa in 1827 to create on the island of Fernando Po (Bioko) a new settlement at which to relocate, from its unhealthy location at Sierra Leone, the international court which dealt with captured slave-ships. Although the court itself did not move, Owen’s mission was completed with energy, innovation, and insight, and a colony was established. His professional career, however, was not advanced. His principal patrons at the Admiralty moved to other offices and he was involved in controversies with colonial officials, merchants of Sierra Leone, fellow naval officers, and a native ruler. Moreover, he used the advantageous location of Fernando Po to capture numerous slave-ships, although patrolling was not part of his responsibility, and the Admiralty suspected him of being lured by prize money. With these problems and the onset of fever, Owen became exhausted. Years of exacting service in the tropics had temporarily affected his temper and judgement. Sir John Barrow of the Admiralty, writing to Robert William Hay of the Colonial Office concerning Owen’s refusal to accept the civil position of superintendent of Fernando Po, summed him up with grudging admiration: “I see you have as well as ourselves despatches from that half crack’d but clever person Owen, declining to accept. . . . I am sorry for it, as he is the man of all others for bringing forward a new settlement, and appears to have done wonders.”

Owen served on the South American station from late 1829. He was originally intended to return to England by way of India, thus completing a connected chain of longitudes around the world, but, because his ship was not fit for a service of many months without a major refit, he was charged with transporting a large bullion shipment across the Atlantic. Arriving in England in August 1831 sick, exhausted, and out of favour, Owen spent a four-year interval there and on Jersey working up sailing directions based on the African surveys, settling accounts, and dealing with accumulated private and public business. He had been an early member of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society and now he had the opportunity to attend both, providing material for the program of the former and donating instruments to the latter. After vain efforts to prepare a narrative of the 1822–26 surveys, he turned over his material to an editor, Heaton Bowstead Robinson, who brought out two volumes in 1833. The editing was faulty and confusing and by this time descriptions of the slave trade and of tropical fever had lost some of their novelty. The few reviews that appeared were unenthusiastic. Only in later years was the narrative, read in conjunction with his dispatches, discovered to be an invaluable primary source for knowledge of the African coasts.

Now 60 years old and with no prospect of a further naval appointment, Owen turned to settling with his family in British North America. He secured title to Campobello Island, N.B., which had been granted in 1767 to his father and several of his cousins, including David Owen*, and established residence there in September 1835. The island, with some 700 inhabitants, cried out for innovative leadership; its economy was dependent on fishing, there was little fertile land, and timber resources were limited by its size. Investing his small capital, Owen made a strong attempt to realize the island’s commercial potential, incorporating the Campobello Mill and Manufacturing Company on 1 June 1839 and planning to establish a bank. Neither project prospered, in part because of his own limitations of character and age and in part because of the economic circumstances of the time. An enthusiastic supporter of the St Andrews and Quebec Railway who had subscribed for shares and chaired its first public meeting in 1835, he served for years as a director on the revival of the company in 1846.

Owen was quickly attracted to questions of public policy. He was elected to the New Brunswick House of Assembly for Charlotte County in the general election of 1837, taking his seat on 27 Feb. 1838. Banking, commerce, the fisheries, defence, navigational aids, and a steam packet service to Campobello Island and Grand Manan occupied his attention in the house and in committees. He also pressed for the funding of local schools, roads, and lighthouses. For several years his experience and stature made him a very visible member. Defeated in the general election of late 1842, he was appointed on 30 Dec. 1843 to the Legislative Council which he continued to attend until 1851.

In 1841 Captain Owen published, privately and anonymously, The Quoddy hermit; orconversations at Fairfield on religion and superstition, which marked a climax in his growing concern with religious thought and practice. The “hermit” expounds Owen’s religious views in a work which also contains considerable autobiographical detail and colour. He advocated Church of England practice, opposed Methodism, and was a self-confessed millenarian. In practice Owen was a licensed lay reader, leading services twice on Sundays. He expended money and much energy in regenerating the parish of Campobello and rebuilding the fabric of the church. At his urgent prompting the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel sent out Thomas McGhee as missionary to the parish in 1842, but after a year McGhee moved to assist the rector at St Andrews parish. Despite Owen’s continuing efforts many islanders persisted in the New Light tradition [see Henry Alline*].

An exotic figure who became an admiral, Owen looms larger than life in the island’s oral tradition. An authoritative, ageing man who was essentially benevolent in his intentions, he was not, like many of his peers, addicted to alcohol but rather to women. His ambition was to play the role of an English landed proprietor in a colonial island setting. As a justice of the peace from 1841, he exercised broad powers in criminal justice and local administration. His concurrent appointment as judge of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas, which handled civil cases, concerned him little. He held a commission to perform marriages, there being no resident clergy, and it took him to the celebrations and parties at which he shone.

From at least August 1838 Owen had hoped to secure some professional appointment and in September 1842 he began the definitive survey of the Bay of Fundy for the Admiralty. In the winter of 1842–43 lines were measured on the ice of the Saint John River, and the survey of it and its harbour was completed in the next two years. A series of seven tide-gauges provided a statistical basis for understanding the action of the world’s highest tides. The captain, who had served on local and provincial lighthouse commissions, was critical of the siting of lighthouses and pressed his views on the authorities in Saint John and Halifax, while various British and colonial authorities sought his advice, as a senior technical expert, about both the feasibility of a canal at the Nova Scotia–New Brunswick border and the best location for the ocean terminus of the proposed intercolonial railway. The old navy veteran longed for authority to act as an armed naval presence to overawe aggressive American fishermen but ships of the squadron at Halifax occasionally undertook to patrol instead.

Promoted rear-admiral on 21 Dec. 1847, Owen relinquished his surveying duties and was replaced by Peter Frederick Shortland*. Owen made one final voyage under his own pennant, returning his ship, the Columbia, to England for refit. At 73 he was content to let his son-in-law, Captain John James Robinson-Owen, assume more and more of his responsibilities at Campobello Island, with the St Andrew’s and Quebec Railway, and in the Legislative Council. On the death of his first wife in 1852 he took up residence in Saint John in the home of Amy Nicholson, whom he married within a year. Promoted vice-admiral on 27 Oct. 1854, he was pensioned on the reserve list on 6 Feb. 1855. He died less than three years later and was buried in the churchyard on Campobello Island.

A man of enormous energy and single-mindedness of purpose in accomplishing the duty at hand, Captain Owen ploughed a deep and long furrow across the affairs of his age. Personal courage, religious faith, drive, and self-confidence explain his long record of achievement. His insistence on his rank and seniority, combative rivalry with his peers, and inability to appreciate the legitimate aspirations and goals of others, rendered him difficult. He received no mark of honour for his long service, no doubt because of his personality and the innumerable controversies that marked every stage of his career. Yet in his own circle of officers and acquaintances he made and maintained enduring friendships.

A legendary figure in the history of New Brunswick and of southern Africa, Owen inaugurated scientific hydrography in Canada and rightly achieved enduring fame for his service in Africa. As a master surveyor he began with the techniques pioneered by Captain James Cook* but developed his own system of procedure and notation and pressed the refinement of instruments and adaptations of their use. From 1810 he successfully experimented with the use of rockets, visible over considerable distances, to coordinate the recognition of a single moment in time. He attempted to refine the use of astronomical observations as aids to surveying and navigation, and his 1827 book of longitudes was a landmark in that field of endeavour.

For Charlotte County and New Brunswick he represented the half-pay officer, but writ in the largest characters. As holder of numerous civil commissions, landed proprietor, worldly senior naval officer, member of the legislature, and eccentric religious enthusiast, he left his imprint on the province’s life.

Paul G. Cornell

William Fitz William Owen is the author of Tables of latitudes and longitudes by chronometer of places in the AtlanticandIndian oceans, principally on the west and east coasts of Africa, the coasts of Arabia, Madagascar, etc. . . . to which isprefixedan essay on the management and use of chronometers, by Richard Owen, Commander R.N., an officer of theexpeditionThe Quoddy hermit; or conversations at Fairfield on religion and superstition, published in 1841 in Boston under the signature William Fitzwilliam of Fairfield. Owen also prepared a translation of M. M. Franzini’s Roteirodascostas de Portugal, ou Instrucções nauticas . . . ([Lisbon], 1812), entitled Description of the coasts of Portugal andnauticalinstructions ([London], 1814); the manuscript of the translation is preserved in G.B., Ministry of Defence, Hydrographic Dept. (Taunton, Eng.), Misc. papers, 105. The journals of his first African expedition were edited by H. B. Robinson and published as Narrative of voyages to explore the shores of Africa, Arabia, and Madagascar;performed in H.M. ships “Leven” and“Barracouta,” under the direction of Capt. W. F. W. Owen, R.N. (2v., London, 1833).(London, 1827) and of

An extensive collection of Owen’s manuscript and printed charts is also available at the Hydrographic Dept., as are his remarks on the east coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean, 1813–34 (OD 26). Other collections of his papers are found in the National Maritime Museum (London), COO/3/A; N.B. Museum, which holds his estate papers; and the County of Grey–Owen Sound Museum (Owen Sound, Ont.), to which his journal of the east African survey of 1826–32 was donated in 1969 by the late Rear Admiral Sir Edward O. Cochrane, Owen’s great-grandson. The Howell papers, a further collection of Owen letters and memorabilia assembled by Rear Admiral Cochrane, remain in the possession of his daughter, Mrs David Howell of London. Owen’s correspondence with John and Amelia Harris between 1815 and 1850 can be found in the Harris papers; these belong to Dr Robin Harris of Toronto, but are temporarily deposited at the UCA.

G.B., Ministry of Defence, Hydrographic Dept., Letter-books, no.10 (1841–42); Minute-books, 3 (1837–42)–4 (1842–45); Misc. papers, 30–31, 58, 61, 64–65, 68, 86–91; OD 324, Lieut. Pullen, “Narrative of proceedings of a party from HMS Columbia, 1843, Captain W. F. W. Owen.” National Maritime Museum, COO/1/A (William Owen papers); FL/1 (Matthew Flinders papers). N.B. Museum, W. F. Ganong coll., box 20, packet 1. PRO, ADM 1/2262–75; ADM51/155, 51/221, 51/1914, 51/2162, 51/2229, 51/2355, 51/3254, 51/4094; ADM 52/3949; ADM 53/126, 53/364; CO 42/1, 42/172; CO 82/2–3, 82/10–11; CO 267/83, 267/94, 267/98; CO 324/81; FO 54/1. USPG, C/CAN/NB, 5: 91; Journal of SPG, 45.

Thomas Boteler, Narrative of a voyage of discovery to Africa and Arabia, performed in his majesty’s ships, “Leven”and“Barracouta,” from 1821 to 1826, under the command of Capt. F. W. Owen, R.N. (2v., London, 1835). William Owen, “The journal of Captain William Owen, R.N., during his residence on Campobello in 1770–71 . . . ,” ed. W. F. Ganong, N.B. Hist. Soc., Coll. (Saint John), 1 (1894–97), no.2: 193–220; 2 (1899–1905), no.4: 8–29. Report on the climate and principaldiseases of the Africanstation . . . , comp. Alexander Bryson (London, 1847). SPG, [Annual report] (London), 1842–43. Anaccount of the SaintAndrews and Quebec Railway, being the original intercolonial railway, from its first inception in1835 to the present timephd thesis, Syracuse Univ., Syracuse, N.Y., 1972). E. H. Burrows, Captain Owen of the Africansurvey . . . (Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1979). John Gray, The British in Mombasa, 1824–1826: being a history ofCaptain Owen’s protectorate (London, 1957). M. V. Jackson, European powers and south-east Africa; a study ofinternational relations on the south-east coast of Africa,1796–1856 (London, [1942]). J. G. Boulton, “[Paper on Admiral Bayfield],” Literary and Hist. Soc. of Quebec, Trans. (Quebec), new ser., 28 (1909–10): 27–95. P. G. Cornell, “William Fitzwilliam Owen, naval surveyor,” N.S. Hist. Soc., Coll., 32 (1959): 161–82. R. F. Fleming, “Charting the Great Lakes,” Canadian Geographic Journal (Montreal), 12 (January–April 1936): 68–77. Robin Harris, “The beginnings of the hydrographic survey of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River,” Historic Kingston, no.14 (1966): 24–39. Olive [Mitchell] Magowan, “The Owens of Glensevern: part ii, Admiral William Fitzwilliam Owen,” Saint CroixCourier(St Stephen, N.B.), 12 Oct. 1977: 14. (Saint John, N.B., 1869). R. T. Brown, “William Fitzwilliam Owen: hydrographer of the African coast, 1774–1857”

LOCAL HISTORY: The Owen-Bayfield connection

By Tom Villemaire, Friday, April 15, 2016

Born Sept. 17, 1774, illegitimate and orphaned, Owen became a brilliant student who excelled at math and languages. A friend helped him gain a position in the Royal Navy at the age of 13.

There, he found his place in the universe. While he was awkward with strangers and, in civilian life, considered an eccentric, his skills as a navigator, cartographer and other midshipman-ish things stood him in good stead on any ship. That’s not to say the Royal Navy tolerated nonsense — twice, Owen’s position was reduced for disciplinary reasons.

By 1797, he was lieutenant on the gun vessel Flamer and served under Lord Nelson until 1803. He was seen to be a more-than-competent commander of “unusual energy.”

He served in the Indian Ocean and led naval assault landing parties and piloted fleets into action through uncharted waters, but was captured by the French and spent 21 months as a prisoner of war. On his release, he returned to the service and was made a post captain. He began surveying in the Indian Ocean.

In 1807, he commented on the surveying methods of the East India Company, which he thought slow: “Give me my health, a Blue Coat Boy, a Boat of 70 tons, Twenty Men & a Cockle Shell Jolly Boat & I would do it all whilst they are preparing for it.”

Admiral G.H. Richards, hydrographer of the Royal Navy from 1863-74, said “the labours of the surveyor have always been and always must be the precursor of commerce.”

During the Napoleonic Wars, in which Owen served, the Royal Navy lost more ships to rocks and reefs and other navigational hazards than to cannonballs and other enemy action. And with that in mind, they ordered Owen to Canada. So, his first duty as an official marine surveyor was in Canada from May 1815 to August 1817. It included two stages: the first, a rush job following the War of 1812; the second, a more deliberate scientific survey of the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes.

But he started even earlier — he made a series of astronomical measures while crossing the Atlantic and took the longitude and latitude of significant places on the way up the St. Lawrence all the way to Penetanguishene. These fixed points allowed him to make rapid measurements to build a framework for the surveying he would do.

His first summer, he determined a number of urgent details for the further defence of the province, including examining positions for naval bases and boundaries between Canada and the United States in the Cornwall area as well as the Detroit River, and running surveys of Lake Erie and the east shore of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay, right up to where Victoria Harbour is today. Along Georgian Bay, he noted stands of timber, land forms and navigational hazards while sailing the bay in the schooner Huron.

In his first year, he’d surveyed a large part of the St. Lawrence, Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. It was considered a reconnaissance survey, but it was the most complete to date and, for much of the area, the first survey ever.

He continued to survey even during the winter. Working on the ice with seven officers and 50 seamen, he managed to chart 300 miles in 69 days with 10,000 angles. (Surveying requires angles and baselines to make measurements — if you imagine a triangle over an area and if you know the angles and two side measurements of that triangle, you can calculate the angle and measure of the third side.) His margin of error was less than two inches to the mile.

This was the first accurate surveying done in Canada and it was started partly in Simcoe County.

The winter work, in weather that reached almost -20 C, took place “every day successively except the Sabbath from Eight O’Clock in the morning to six at night.”

Owen trained a man whose name is well-known in Barrie and Simcoe County: Lt. Henry Bayfield. Bayfield finished the work his boss started.

But before then, Owen reported in detail how improvements could be made between York (Toronto) and Lake Huron by using the Nottawasaga River. This encouraged a base at Wasaga Beach, later called Schooner Town, which would help service Penetanguishene and forts to the north.

Before he left in 1817, Owen also managed to fit in travelling the Trent-Severn route, with aboriginal guides, but was reticent to recommend it because of the numerous dams and locks that would be needed.

After little more than two years in Canada, he’d established the science of hydrography here and himself as a master surveyor on the world stage. Of course, in his short stay, he only touched on the area and it was up to Bayfield to carry on the job — but that’s another story.

However, it’s not the wilds of Canada Owen is famous for; he’s best known, globally, for his surveys of the coasts of Africa, which took four years. His crew suffered horrifying losses due to illness. After his surgeon died, Owen started treating his crew members’ fevers. Instead of bleeding them (a navy medical practice Owen had condemned), he administered a purgative, prescribed rest and fresh air and, on remission, gave them quinine — an approach that was later widely adopted.

And while he wasn’t supposed to be patrolling (his was a research vessel), it didn’t stop him from seizing slave-trade ships he saw during his surveys. His testimony and that of his crew helped fortify the anti-slave movement in England.

Driving himself too hard, he became ill and the navy tried to “reward” him with a desk job. Sir John Barrow of the Admiralty, writing to Robert William Hay of the Colonial Office concerning Owen’s refusal to accept the civil position of superintendent of Fernando Po, summed him up with grudging admiration: “I see you have as well as ourselves despatches from that half crack’d but clever person Owen, declining to accept ... I am sorry for it, as he is the man of all others for bringing forward a new settlement, and appears to have done wonders.”

Instead, Owen moved on to the South American station in 1829. He planned to sail to England from South America and Africa, completing a connected chain of longitudes right around the globe. But his ship was even more worn out than he was, and he was ordered to haul a shipment of bullion to England. He arrived in 1831, still ill.

He returned to Canada at the age of 60 and landed in New Brunswick on Campobello Island. He became a banker and supporter of a Quebec railway company and was elected to the New Brunswick House of Assembly in 1837. He was also a published author, active in his church and, eventually, became an admiral.

He was legendary in New Brunswick and remembered on the coasts of Africa for his survey work as well as his anti-slave service. But it was along the north shore of what would become Simcoe County where he first made his mark — a man who really did think globally, act locally.

Owen Sound is named after him and there are Owen streets in communities all around the Great Lakes area in Ontario and Canada on the coasts. His protégé, Bayfield, has towns, streets and schools named after him.

Tom Villemaire is the co-author of two books with Randy Richmond: Colossal Canadian Failures and Colossal Canadian Failures 2 — both about things that seemed like a good idea at the time — and writes about local history.

Admiral Henry Wolsey Bayfield

For forty years, from 1816 to 1856, Bayfield surveyed previously uncharted shorelines of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence from the western extremity of Lake Superior to the Straits of Belle Isle.

By: Hugh Whiteley, P.Eng.

Henry Bayfield, or to give him more formal recognition, Admiral Henry Wolsey Bayfield, devoted his adult life to the work of surveying coastal areas of Canada. He was in practice, but not title, Canada’s first chief hydrographer. His important role in the mapping of the shorelines of Lake Erie, Lake St. Clair, the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers, and Lake Huron earn him a place in this volume.

Bayfield is commemorated in Ontario through the naming of the Bayfield River and the Village of Bayfield. The Dutch nobleman who founded and named Bayfield, Ontario met Bayfield in Quebec City in the 1830s. Following Bayfield’s advice, he purchased 3,000 acres of the Huron tract at the mouth of the Bayfield River; Bayfield had identified the locale as a potential port.

For forty years, from 1816 to 1856, Bayfield surveyed previously uncharted shorelines of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence from the western extremity of Lake Superior to the Straits of Belle Isle. He also produced the first accurate charts for much of the coasts of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Prior to the assumption of responsibility for hydrographic surveying by the Canadian government in 1884, the British Admiralty issued 215 charts of Canadian waters; Bayfield was author of more than half of these – 114 charts.

Pioneer surveyors such as Bayfield possessed an extraordinary capacity for hard work and persistence while enduring prolonged isolation, difficult terrain, bad weather, poor food and makeshift accommodation. Bayfield had two other defining characteristics. He had a near-fanatical commitment to accuracy in observations and in the charts he created, and he had an abiding fascination with science as a source of improved capacity to achieve accurate results. These characteristics are important in engineering practice and it is appropriate to acknowledge Bayfield as a precursor of the practice of engineering in southwestern Ontario

A Childhood in Her Majesty’s Navy

Henry Bayfield was born in the seaport of Hull on the north east coast of England, on January 21, 1795. The few facts known about his father include his three years of service in the British army and his death in 1839 at the age of seventy-three. Both of Henry’s parents had ties to Norfolk. His maternal grandfather was the Anglican Vicar of Wymondham, Norfolk and his father may have been related to the Bayfield family that occupied Bayfield Hall in Holt, Norfolk. Henry’s only sister Helen Eliza married Sir Gregory Page-Turner, which suggests Henry’s family was relatively well-to-do.

A family move from Hull to Norfolk in 1803 is indicated by Henry’s record of baptism, at age 8, in the parish of St. Edmunds, Fishergate, Norfolk. No record of school attendance has been found for Henry. Whatever formal education he received was of short duration. In January 1806, two weeks before his eleventh birthday, Henry was enrolled in the Royal Navy as a young gentleman volunteer.

Within nine months, at the age of only eleven, Henry had served on three warships, been slightly wounded in a engagement with Spanish gun boats in the Gut of Gibraltar, and been promoted from supernumerary to volunteer first class. He so impressed his superior officer Lieutenant Spilsbury that ten years later Spilsbury recalled in a letter in support of a promotion for Bayfield that “tho’ a youth he displayed presence of mind that would become the greatest Warrior.”

During the turbulent decade from 1806 to 1816 the Royal Navy was heavily engaged in conflicts in both Europe and North America. Bayfield saw action off the coast of Spain and France, spent two years in the West Indies and, at the age of fifteen and sixteen, a year in Halifax and Quebec City. He passed his lieutenant’s examination in Portsmouth, England in February 1814. Returning to Canada, he was serving on a ship on Lake Champlain when the hostilities of the war of 1812 ceased in the autumn of 1814.

Charting the Wilderness

The naval maneuvers on the Great Lakes during the war of 1812 had alerted the British Admiralty to the lack of accurate mapping of the Great Lakes. In 1815, as part of the effort to strengthen Canadian defences against the continuing threat of American incursions, the Admiralty ordered Captain William Owen to undertake a systematic survey of the Great Lakes. Captain Owen was a veteran officer who had returned to England in 1813 after service in Southeast Asia, where he participated in the destruction of the Dutch fleet in Java and explored the Maldive Islands.

Captain Owen set up a headquarters in Kingston, Ontario in the summer of 1815, after a meeting in Quebec City with his elder brother, Sir Edward Owen, Commander-in-Chief of British forces on the Great Lakes. During the summer and fall, Owen and three assistants made excellent progress, completing initial reconnaissance surveys of large portions of the lower Great Lakes. They visited much of the eastern portion of Lake Ontario, the north shore of Lake Erie, the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River, and ventured up the Thames River. A September trip along Lake Huron from the St. Clair River to Penetanguishine included a viewing of the eastern shore of Lake Huron and both coasts of the Bruce peninsula, with quick surveys of Owen Bay (now Owen Sound, named after Captain Owen’s brother) and of the harbour at Penetanguishine.

By the end of the summer, Owen recognized that the task of charting the Great Lakes required a larger staff and a longer time than he had first expected. He asked for and received from his brother new instructions and permission to add to his staff. In January 1816, Henry Bayfield’s war service on the H.M.S. Champlain formally ended with his transfer to the British naval headquarters in Kingston. Bayfield’s long career as a hydrographer began in Kingston shortly after his arrival, when he was recruited by Owen to join the lake survey.

Henry Bayfield had a lively intellect and a lifelong propensity for reading and study. He quickly gained skills as a surveyor under the tutelage of Owen and other experienced members of the survey group. One member of the group, John Harris, became a close friend. Harris left the hydrographic service after two years to settle in Port Ryse on Lake Erie, but Bayfield kept up correspondence with John and his wife Amelia for three decades. These letters are a valuable source of information on Bayfield’s early years, since Bayfield’s journals for this period have been lost.

In 1816, Bayfield was responsible for the mapping of the American shore of Lake Ontario at the eastern end of the lake. With this project completed, he worked on the Canadian shore of the St. Lawrence from the Thousand Islands to the Bay of Quinte in Lake Ontario. He also did a survey of the harbour of Toronto.

Owen was immediately impressed by his recruit. By the end of the summer, Owen had acted somewhat beyond his authority in appointing Bayfield as a Lieutenant of the Star Sloop (Bayfield had the technical qualifications for the appointment, but the Lords of the Admiralty thought Owen should have obtained their permission). In support of his actions, Owen drew special attention to Bayfield’s assiduity and ability in the hydrographic service.

At the end of the survey season, Bayfield prepared to leave for England in accordance with his assignment. Faced with the prospect of losing his most valuable team member, Captain Owen strongly recommended to the Admiralty’s representative in Canada that Bayfield remain in Canada under appointment as an assistant surveyor. Bayfield accepted the employment without hesitation when the offer was approved.

The assistant surveyors spent a pleasant winter in Kingston in a dwelling nicknamed Hydrographers’ House. John Harris and his young wife provided a home environment. At the start of the1817 season, Captain Owen was temporarily diverted from his lake surveys to do a quick exploration up the Trent River in search of a possible “inland” route from Kingston to Lake Huron. The assistant surveyors were assigned the task of surveying the south side of Lake Ontario and both sides of the Niagara River. Captain Owen was to join the group at Fort Erie the first week of June to begin surveys of Lake Erie. Then there was a sudden change of plans.

Just as Captain Owen reached Fort Erie, he received orders to return to England immediately, taking all his officers except Lt. Bayfield. Ruth McKenzie writes in her introduction to her publication on Bayfield’s survey journals: “And so, on 24 June 1817, twenty-two-year-old Henry Bayfield, without fanfare, and probably with a sense of shock and certainly unaware of the significance of the occasion, embarked on what was to become a forty-year career as surveyor-in-chief of three Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River and Gulf.”

In characteristic fashion, Bayfield set to work immediately to satisfy his new responsibilities. Working with a loyal assistant, Midshipman Collins, and with the voluntary assistance of another navy officer, Lt. Renny, Bayfield completed the survey of the north and south shore of Lake Erie and of the shoreline of Lake St. Clair and the St Clair River in 1817. Malaria was a major problem for people working among the clouds of “moschettoes” at the west end of Lake Erie and along the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair. Bayfield had to spend two weeks off work in Amhertsburg to recover from an attack of “ague.”

Residents of Southern Ontario are generally unaware of the former presence of malaria in the region, or the extent of its effects on activities. Two years after Bayfield’s difficulties in the marshes of Lakes Erie and St. Clair, David Thompson, Canadian explorer and now principal British surveyor on the Joint U.S.-British Commission, covered the same area to establish the Canadian-U.S. border. Despite a dramatic warning from the chief U.S. Commissioner to avoid the marshes or risk death, the two surveyors, Thompson and his American counterpart Douglass, went ahead.

Within days, members of both survey parties contracted “swamp fever.” Thompson and two others in the Canadian party were so weakened, they had to be evacuated to a tavern in Amhertsburg, perhaps the same convalescent location as Bayfield used. Thompson recovered after ten days in bed, but two assistants died. Although not directly engaged in the surveying activity, the Canadian Commissioner John Ogilvy also contracted malaria and died in Amhersburg. Malaria persisted in the Detroit area into the twentieth century and was not eradicated until the 1940s.

After his recovery from the ague, Bayfield spent the remainder of the 1817 season surveying the west coast of Lake Huron to the entrance to Lake Michigan. In November the surveyors walked from Penetanguishine to Lake Simcoe and then along Yonge Street to York. They spent the winter in Kingston working up their survey data into charts.

Lake Huron, and especially Georgian Bay with its multiplicity of islands, was much more challenging to map than any previous area Bayfield had worked in. As a result of the difficulty, it was not until the fall of 1822 that surveying of Lake Huron was completed. The crew had spent four winters at the recently established naval station at Penetanguishine to avoid the trips to and from Kingston each year.

From Lake Superior to the Gulf of St Lawrence

Ten years after the Huron survey ended, Bayfield described the extremely trying conditions of this work in a letter to Francis Beaufort who had been appointed Chief Hydrographer of the Admiralty in 1829. Beaufort’s name is most remembered for the scale for winds that he developed. During his long tenure as Chief Hydrographer, he had many interesting responsibilities, including coordinating the long search for the Franklin expedition in the Canadian Arctic and recruiting Charles Darwin as accompanying scientist on the second voyage of the survey ship Beagle. Bayfield greatly respected Beaufort, and Beaufort in turn had high regard for Bayfield and his work.

Bayfield wrote: “Two boats, not larger than ships Cutters, carried our whole stock of conveniences, of which we had fewer than the native Indians. [We] slept, in all weathers, in the boat, or on shore upon a Buffaloe robe under the Boat’s mainsail thrown over a few branches …[cold weather] ... was not so wearing as trying to sleep in vain, in the warm nights of summer (when the Thermometer was at 80 degrees) in the smoke of a Fire to keep off the clouds of Moschettoes which literally darkened the air, fatigued as we generally were from sitting in the sun from sun rise to sun set in our open boats ….and when this occurred the Ague, or some other sickness was sure to make it’s appearance among us.”

In 1820, the International Boundary Survey parties were on Lake Huron, and Bayfield met David Thompson and provided some assistance to him. The newly appointed Canadian Commissioner, David Barclay, confirmed the difficult conditions surveyors met. He described conditions as “very rough and wild, still being in its pristine state: consequently it presents every obstacle which can be encountered with little means of subduing any.” During Bayfield’s surveys, except for a handful of fur traders and the small establishment at the Penetanguishine naval station, all the inhabitants of the upper Great Lakes were aboriginal people.

Bayfield’s survey of Lake Huron had taken longer and involved higher expenses than the British Admiralty expected. Bayfield was unsure of any extension of his contract, but early in 1823 the Admiralty gave him orders to proceed to Lake Superior. He and his assistant Collins spent three years on the Lake Superior survey, with winters spent at the Hudson Bay Company post in Fort William.

In 1824, Bayfield renewed acquaintance with David Thompson who was still engaged in the boundary survey. David Thompson’s celebrated Map of the NORTH-WEST TERRITORY of the PROVINCE of CANADA hung in the Great Hall of the Fort William post when the post was taken over by the Hudson Bay Company in 1821. The map may have been sent to the Arrowsmith Company in England prior to Bayfield’s first visit to Fort William. If the map had still been available, Bayfield would have greatly admired this first accurate representation of previously unmapped wilderness and congratulated his colleague Thompson on his pioneering work.

Another visitor of note to Fort William was Sir John Franklin, who passed through Fort William in April 1825 on his second Arctic expedition. He brought Bayfield a draftsman from Penetanguishine and left in Bayfield’s charge a defective chronometer and barometer for return to the Admiralty.

After six years in the remote wilderness, Bayfield sailed for England in October 1825. He spent two years at the Admiralty in London preparing the charts for the Great Lakes. Upon completion of the work in May 1827, Bayfield was keen to return to Canada “for I love the country and feel interested in its welfare.” He proposed to the Admiralty a complete survey of the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf. This proposal was approved with great speed, and Bayfield arrived in Quebec City on September 1, 1827.

The survey of the St. Lawrence River and Gulf took fifteen years, from 1827 to 1841. Much of the area was extremely difficult to survey, with traitorous currents and frequent storms and fogs. The survey was badly needed as evidenced by the large number of shipwrecks along this coast.

One notable contact Bayfield made during the survey was with the naturalist J. J. Audubon, who was visiting the Labrador coast in 1833 in the schooner Ripley. The two shared several social evenings. Canadian author Catherine Govier used these encounters as the basis for her novel Creation (2003).

Winters in Quebec City provided Bayfield with a lively social life – a strong contrast to the many lonely winters in Penetanguishine and Fort William. In April 1838, after a five-year courtship, Henry married Fanny Amelia Wright, daughter of a Captain in the Royal Engineers stationed in Quebec. Fanny was an accomplished artist, and her paintings are included in the collection of the Public Archives of Canada and in several galleries in Prince Edward Island.

The winter periods also gave Bayfield time for writing. He contributed several scientific papers on the topic of locational geomatics. In addition, he wrote two papers on geology, one dealing with Lake Superior and one with the Labrador coast. His major published work was a sailing guide for the St. Lawrence that had its first edition in 1837 and was finally completed four years after his retirement in 1860.

The Atlantic Seaboard

At the close of the 1840 season, the surveying of the St. Lawrence was completed. The areas for new work were on the Atlantic coast. In May 1841, Bayfield moved with his family to establish a new headquarters in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. This became his permanent Canadian home for forty-four years, and he died there in 1885.

Prior to Bayfield’s retirement in 1856, he completed charts for much of the coastline of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia (including Halifax harbour) and Prince Edward Island. He had earlier been called in as a consultant for the proposed dredging of Lake St. Peter between Quebec City and Montreal. During his stay in Charlottetown he made several consultative visits to provide advice on suitable locations for lighthouses on Sable Island and in Newfoundland.

Bayfield was pleased to renew his acquaintance with his old mentor Captain W.F.W. Owen in 1843. After leaving Canada in 1817, Captain Owen became famous for his epic seven-year voyage from 1821 to 1828 mapping the east coast of Africa, a voyage during which more than half of his staff died of malaria. He had taken up residence on a family estate at Campobello near the border with Maine in 1835. In 1842 he was commissioned to chart the Bay of Fundy.

Owen and Bayfield conducted pioneering work to connect their two surveys on opposite sides of the narrow isthmus between Cumberland Basin off the Bay of Fundy and Baie Verte on the Northumberland Straits. Their joint operation involved a technique developed by Owen that required synchronized celestial observations achieved using rocket flashes and sets of carefully compared chronometers.

The observations with Owen aided Bayfield in his continuing interest, bordering on an obsession, to establish the “true” longitude of St. Johns, Halifax and Quebec City.

He spent many weeks, in several different years, making elaborate calculations to connect surveys. He was delighted when improved chronometers became available. When telegraphic linkages became available in the 1850s, he eagerly examined this opportunity for synchronous observations with scientists at the Cambridge Observatory in Massachusetts.

Appraisal of Bayfield’s Work

The core motivation for all of Henry Bayfield’s work was improving public welfare through a reduction in the hazards of navigation. He employed up-to-date science in all his endeavors and had a lively interest in a wide variety of fields not directly involved with his geomatics work, including geology and scientific appraisal of fish stocks. His dedication to accuracy, his comprehensive approach to knowledge, and his dedication to the public good all are attributes that engineering practitioners strive to emulate.

Bayfield took good care of his crews. He added a doctor as a staff member when work on the St. Lawrence began in 1828. The only noted fatality was the sudden death from an attack of “apoplexy” of Lieutenant Philip Collins in 1835. While the surveyors were fortunate to be away from Quebec City during several severe outbreaks of cholera, some deaths occurred among crew members during the winter layoff.

When Bayfield arrived in Quebec City, Trinity House, the official body responsible for shipping on the St. Lawrence, treated him with suspicion. When he left for Charlottetown fourteen years later, the Master of Trinity House personally delivered a testimonial from the board expressing their appreciation for his advice and assistance and extolling the “talents and scientific achievements of Captain Bayfield.”

Bayfield’s successor on Lake Huron was Captain John Boulton, appointed by the government of Canada in 1883 to extend Bayfield’s surveys in Georgian Bay. As a mark of his respect for Bayfield, Boulton named his survey vessel “The Bayfield.” In doing so, he established a tradition still maintained by the Canadian Hydrographic Service. Boulton summarized his debt to Bayfield as follows: “I had a good opportunity of witnessing the marvelous quantity and excellence of Admiral Bayfield’s work.” These words of high praise would have pleased Bayfield, who himself gave a similarly glowing assessment of his predecessor on the Labrador coast, Captain James Cook, whose charts he found to be “extremely correct.”

In 1891, the then-longest underwater tunnel in the world was completed under the St. Clair River. Surely Bayfield would have delighted in this engineering marvel both as a sign of the positive changes seventy-four years had brought to a locale he experienced as a fever-ridden wasteland, and on account of the highly accurate surveying that was required. Two digging crews starting from opposite sides of the river met at the midpoint under the river with only a few centimeters difference in level and location of their centerlines. One can imagine Bayfield giving a hearty bravo – and then asking for permission to examine the theodolites that made this possible!

Acknowledgments

The quotations from Bayfield and the factual record of his activities are taken from the excellent biography written by Ruth McKenzie as her introduction to the two-volume publication The St. Lawrence Survey Journals of Captain Henry Wolsey Bayfield, 1829-1853. The quotation from Barclay and the information on David Thompson are taken from D’Arcy Jenish’s biography of David Thompson entitled Epic Wanderer.

Bibliography

Bayfield, H. W. The St. Lawrence Journals of Captain Henry Wolsey Bayfield, 1829- 1853. Ed. and introduction Ruth McKenzie. Publications of the Champlain Society. Vol. 54 and 55. Toronto, 1986

Jenish, D’Arcy. Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2004.