Crawford Pasco
Royal Navy officer and Australian police magistrate (1818-1898)
Crawford Atchison Denman Pasco (17 January 1818 – 28 February 1898) was a Royal Navy officer and Australian police magistrate during the 19th century.
Career
There were two periods to his career, first as in the Royal Navy:
He joined aged 12 years, in 1830 and served on:
HMS Nimrod including the 1832 blockade of the Scheldt during the Portuguese Civil War, and the 1833 Siege of Porto on HMS Tagus
HMS Blonde and HMS Satellite 1834–37 stationed chiefly off Peru and Chile
HMS Britomart 1838 under Lieutenant Owen Stanley and sailed to Port Essington to prepare a settlement
HMS Beagle 1839 under John Clements Wickham, then under John Lort Stokes, engaged in surveying parts of Australia's northern and western coasts, discovering in particular the Adelaide River, the future port of Darwin and the Victoria River
Colonial cutter Vansittart 1842 for survey work in Bass Strait
1843 returned to England and appointed to HMS Vestal sailed via America to the Far East, South Africa, Van Diemen's Land and thence to Canton and Singapore with two million dollars, reparation from the Opium War. He sailed for Penang, subdued a rebellious rajah in Borneo, and then visited the Philippines
the paddle-steamer HMS Vulture surveying the Canton River and then the Palawan Island area, with renewed contact with Borneo rebels
1851 returned to England on leave because of illness
retired from the navy he settled in Victoria
He wrote in 1846 to the editor of the Hong Kong Register suggesting that P&O might extend its mail steamer services from Singapore to Australia. The letter was republished in the Sydney Morning Herald. and other Australian papers.
In 1852 P&O gave him free passage on the inaugural voyage to Australia of the SS Chusan.
And later in Victoria, Australia:
1852 appointed a territorial magistrate, superintendent of water police and resident magistrate at Williamstown After repeated clashes with officers of the hulks, following a board of inquiry, in 1857 he was transferred to Swan Hill
later he was magistrate at Maryborough, Port Albert and Alexandra
with many other magistrates he was dismissed on 24 January 1878.
Retirement
Pasco retired in Melbourne and became a founder member of the Victorian branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia in 1884, he was chairman of the first Antarctic Exploration Committee.
In 1885, he published Early exploration of Australia. In 1897 he published A Roving Commission, a vivid account of his naval life.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Crawford Pasco” as royal Navy officer and Australian police magistrate (1818-1898). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q14935083. VIAF identifies the subject as 93304365. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1818, 1898, 1830 and 1832.
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This entry incorporates text from “Crawford Pasco” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.