sketcher and traveller, was born in Bunny, Nottinghamshire, youngest son of Captain Joseph Boultbee and Sarah Elizabeth, née Lane. He worked in a merchant’s office during 1817, then embarked on a life of extensive travel. He apparently sketched wherever he went and kept a regular journal despite his rough itinerant existence. In 1821 Boultbee came to Van Diemen’s Land in the Woodlark , via Brazil and Barbados. There he hunted seals in Bass Strait. He then went to Sydney and Port Macquarie in New South Wales, sailing for New Zealand in 1825 and remaining there for the next three years. Between 1828 and 1830 he was based in Sydney, working as a fisherman. He sailed on a whaling ship to Perth and found a job with Mr Trigg on 7 February 1830. He then applied for a position as a clerk. Instead, on 11 September 1832, he was employed by Mr Morgan, the government storekeeper, to help transfer stores from Garden Island to the mainland. Tried in January 1833 for larceny, he was acquitted and spent the last part of his three years in Perth as a Swan River boatman.
Boultbee left Western Australia on a whaler bound for the Timor Sea. He died at Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1854. His manuscript 'Journal of a Rambler’ illustrated with rough sketches is now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. It was published in 1986 with a selection of the sketches, none of an Australian subject.
- Writers:
- Dixon, Christine
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
