Edwin A. Porcher

Born in 1824, Edwin Augustus Porcher was a British naval officer, sketcher, and diarist whose papers have been preserved in major archives. Sources describe him as a scientific observer and unofficial artist aboard HMS Fly, which carried out the first hydrographic survey of the northeastern Australian coast and nearby islands in the 1840s.

Porcher later served on voyages to South and East Asia aboard HMS Cleopatra, and in the Mediterranean and North Africa aboard HMS Hibernia, HMS Kertch, and HMS Boxer. His journals and drawings record places including Tasmania, Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef, the Torres Strait, and ports around Asia and the Mediterranean, giving modern readers a lively sense of travel, surveying, and everyday shipboard experience.

He died in 1878. Although he is not widely known today, the collections of his diaries, log books, and watercolor sketches have made him an important eyewitness to nineteenth-century naval exploration and empire.