John Clements Wickham
Explorer of Australia (1798-1864)
John Clements Wickham (21 November 1798 – 6 January 1864) was a Scottish explorer, naval officer, magistrate and administrator. He was first lieutenant on HMS Beagle during its second survey mission, 1831–1836, under captain Robert FitzRoy. The young naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin was a supernumerary on the ship, and his journal was published as The Voyage of the Beagle. After that expedition, Wickham was promoted to Commander and made captain of the Beagle on its third voyage, from 1837 and conducted various maritime expeditions and hydrographic surveys along the Australian coastline.
In 1843, after his retirement from the Royal Navy, Wickham was made Police Magistrate and, later, Government Resident of the Moreton Bay District, in the Colony of New South Wales (NSW). Wickham retired in 1859, when the Moreton Bay District was separated from NSW, forming basis of the Colony of Queensland. When the Queensland and NSW governments disagreed over which was responsible for his pension, Wickham moved to France, where he died.
The Wickham family
The origins of the Wickham family were in Rowley, an East Yorkshire village which later became depopulated. In 1638, two brothers, Richard and Thomas Wickham, were among the families to emigrate to America with Rev. Ezekiel Rogers after he was suspended as Rector of the parish church in 1638 for his non-conformist beliefs.
“John Clements Wickham” enters the record as explorer of Australia (1798-1864). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Clements and Wickham can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q741094. VIAF identifies the subject as 169118911. The Library of Congress control number is no2025060868. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1798, 1864, 1831 and 1836.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Clements Wickham” 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.