sketcher and missionary, made a mission tour of eastern Australia and the islands of the South Seas in the Henry Freeling with his father Daniel, departing from London in November 1833 and visiting Van Diemen’s Land in August 1834. They ended their voyage at Sydney in February 1837 where the ship was sold. The Wheelers met up with their fellow Quaker missionaries, James Backhouse and George Washington Walker , at Hobart Town and later accompanied them to Sydney and Norfolk Island. Several of Charles’s drawings were used as illustrations in Backhouse’s A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London 1843), including the frontispiece, a view of Hobart Town. The Mooneys suggest that Charles Wheeler also sketched in oils.
A large collection of Charles’s letters, written on the voyage to his brothers and sisters in Russia, is in the Daniel Wheeler Collection in the library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. Daniel Wheeler’s Extracts from the Letters and Journal … While Engaged on a Religious Visit to the Inhabitants of Some of the Islands of the Pacific Ocean, Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales and New Zealand was published in Philadelphia in 1840, the year both he and Charles died.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
