George Windsor Earl (1813 - 1865)
Navigator, colonial administrator, and author, born in Hampstead, London on 10 February 1813, the son of Percy William Earl (1771–1827), a ship's captain. His elder brother Percy William Earl (1811–1846) was also a naturalist.
Earl became a midshipman at age fourteen and travelled to India before joining the early colonists in Western Australia in 1830. He resumed his nautical career in 1832, working the trade routes between Batavia and Singapore, and eventually gained command of a trading vessel. Returning to England, he became involved in a scheme to colonise the north of Australia and departed for Port Essington in 1838. By 1845, the hardships of the North Australia Expedition had exhausted him, and a later venture to promote cotton and trade in the region met with a similar result. From 1855 until his death he held a succession of official administrative posts, his last at Penang.
Earl is principally remembered as a prolific writer and authority on the hydrography and peoples of the Indian Archipelago. His first major work, The Eastern Seas, or Voyages and Adventures in the Indian Archipelago 1832–33–34 (London, 1837), established his reputation, and his Sailing Directions for the Arafura Sea (1839) drew on Dutch navigational narratives. His 1845 pamphlet On the Physical Geography of South-Eastern Asia and Australia described how shallow seas connected the western islands of Sumatra and Java to the Asian continent, while the eastern islands such as New Guinea were connected to Australia — an observation that provided direct inspiration for Alfred Russel Wallace's proposal of the faunal boundary now known as the Wallace Line. Charles Darwin also drew on Earl's hydrographic observations in his own work on the region.
In 1850 Earl published the term 'Indu-nesians', from the Greek nesos (island) combined with India, a coinage that was later adapted as the name Indonesia. His anthropological study The Native Races of the Indian Archipelago: Papuans, compiled from interviews with explorers including Owen Stanley and Dumont d'Urville, served as a standard reference on Papuan peoples well into the twentieth century.
Earl died on 9 August 1865 while at sea, off Penang, and is buried at the Old Protestant Cemetery, George Town, in present-day Malaysia.
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