Eyre, EDWARD JOHN

Eyre, EDWARD JOHN, an Australian explorer and colonial governor, the son of a Yorkshire clergyman, was born in August 1815. Emigrating to Australia at the age of seventeen, he prospered as a squatter on the Lower Murray, and was appointed a resident magistrate and protector of the aborigines. In 1840 he failed in an attempt to explore the region between South and Western Australia, though he discovered Lake Torrens. The task which he had set himself, however, he accomplished, in spite of enormous difficulties, in 1841 (Discoveries in Central Australia, 1845). In 1846 he became lieutenant-governor of New Zealand, and in 1852 of St Vincent in the West Indies. In 1862 he was appointed governor of Jamaica, where in 1865 negro disturbances broke out. The outbreak was suppressed with sharp, stern severity, martial law being proclaimed in the disaffected district; a wealthy mulatto named Gordon, a Baptist and member of the Jamaica House of Assembly, who had taken a leading part in instigating the rising, was hurriedly tried by court-martial, and hanged two days after, the sentence having been confirmed by Eyre. A commission sent to inquire into this case found that Gordon had been condemned on insufficient evidence, and Eyre was recalled. On his return he was prosecuted by a committee of whom John Stuart Mill was the most prominent; Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, and Sir R. Murchison promoted the Eyre defence fund. The prosecutions could not, however, be sustained; and eventually in 1872 the government refunded to Eyre the costs of his defence. Since his recall he has lived in retirement.