Born August 5, 1815,
Yorkshire, England
Died November 30, 1901,
Near Tavistock, Devon, England
Edward John Eyre was born the son of a clergyman in Yorkshire, England. He immigrated to Australia at the age of 17, arriving in Sydney on March 20, 1833; he used the money he had brought to Australia to buy a sheep ranch. In 1834, after having problems with diseased sheep, he became a pioneer “overlander,” a person who takes livestock overland from settled areas to the outback. Eyre made profitable trips moving animals from Sydney to Melbourne, from Melbourne to Adelaide, and from Sydney to Adelaide.
In 1838 Eyre settled in Adelaide; still working as an overlander, he used the city as a base for exploring the interior. Embarking on his first trip in May 1839, he traveled north of Spencer Gulf, a large body of water on the south coast of Australia. There he discovered a mountain range that was later named Flinders Ranges and a large interior lake, eventually called Lake Terrens, which was usually dry. Later in the same year he went to the west side of Spencer Gulf and explored the Eyre Peninsula, which was named after him.
In January 1840, Eyre took a shipment of cattle from Albany on the south coast of western Australia to the Swan River on the west coast, near the site of the modern-day city of Perth. This trip inspired Eyre to form an ambitious scheme—to find an overland route where cattle could be driven from Adelaide to the west coast of Australia. Receiving financial support from the colonists in South Australia, he set out with a party of eight men from the head of Spencer Gulf in June 1840. At first he went north but could not find a way through the dried-up lake beds that make up this part of Australia. He did, however, go far enough to discover the largest of the lakes, which became known as Lake Eyre.
From Lake Eyre the party headed due west, reaching a place called Streaky Bay on the west side of the Eyre Peninsula in November 1840. Ahead of them stretched an enormous desert, the Nullarbor Plain. “Nullarbor,” which means “no trees,” aptly describes the situation Eyre would encounter after he foolishly decided to cross the desert by a series of forced marches. To carry out his plan he sent back all of the members of the exploring party except his assistant, John Baxter, and three Aborigines. Eyre wrote in his journal that he was determined “either to accomplish the object I have in view, or perish in the attempt.”
Throughout the trip Eyre and his companions were plagued by a scarcity of water and blowing sand that slowed them down. On March 12, 1841, they passed the last water hole at a place that is now called Eucla on the border of Western and South Australia. The only reason they survived was that the Aborigines knew how to get water out of the roots of trees from wells dug in the sand. By the middle of April they were short of food; to make matters worse, the southern winter was starting and the nights were turning very cold. No longer willing to endure the hardship, two of the Aborigines killed Baxter and left with the remaining provisions.
Although Eyre’s only remaining companion was an Aborigine boy named Wylie, he decided to press on. His decision was fortunately rewarded by a rainfall that relieved their parched thirst. Since he and Wylie had no food, however, he had to kill one of his two horses so they would not starve. On June 2, they reached Esperance Bay on the south coast of Western Australia, where they met a French whaling ship at anchor. After resting on the boat for several days, Eyre insisted on completing the journey overland, finally reaching Albany in July 1841.
Eyre and Wylie had made the first trip across Australia. Yet instead of finding a way to drive livestock overland, Eyre had proved just the opposite—there was no practical way of doing so. On his return to Adelaide, Eyre was appointed magistrate for a large unsettled part of the colony of South Australia; he also wrote a history of his explorations.
After Eyre returned to England in 1844 he was appointed to a number of positions in the colonies: in 1846 he was named lieutenant governor of New Zealand; in 1854, lieutenant governor of St. Vincent in the West Indies; and in 1860, governor of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. In 1862 he received his most important post as governor of Jamaica, one of the “jewels in the crown” of Great Britain’s empire. This was to be a temporary assignment during the absence of Jamaica’s regular governor, William Darling.
In October 1865, during Eyre’s tenure as governor in Jamaica, a rebellion by the black native majority broke out in Morant Bay. Eyre used harsh measures to suppress the revolt, executing more than 400 people, flogging and torturing even more, and burning 1,000 houses. Among the protesters who were court-martialed and hanged was Eyre’s political enemy, George Gordon, a member of the local legislature. Eyre declared martial law and suspended Jamaica’s constitution. When news of his conduct was reported in England, a heated debate erupted: was he a hero who had saved Jamaica for the Crown, or was he not only incompetent but a murderer as well?
In 1866 Eyre was censured and recalled to England. Important literary figures such as Thomas Carlyle and Alfred Tennyson supported him, while others, such as Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, demanded that he be tried for murder. After a series of attempts to bring Eyre to trial, a grand jury did not return an indictment against him. In 1868, citing “unnecessary rigour” as Eyre’s principal wrongdoing, a royal commission cleared him of charges in connection with the incident. His legal fees were eventually paid by the government and he was awarded a small pension; he was not asked to serve again in any official capacity. Eyre retired to a country manor in Devon, England, where he lived until his death on November 30, 1901.
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