William Bairstow Ingham

William B. Ingham was born in 1850 at Blake Hall, which was the Ingham family mansion in Mirfield, Yorkshire. His parents were Joshua Ingham, a wealthy businessman who owned mines and mills, and Mary Cunliffe Lister. A young Anne Brontë was employed as a governess at Blake Hall to educate the Ingham children, whose behaviour included spitting at her and throwing her belongings out the window. Brontë described the children as being "desperate little dunces" and later integrated her experiences at Blake Hall into her debut novel Agnes Grey.^[1]

William was educated at Malvern College and later went to University College, Oxford but dropped out before completing his studies. He briefly joined the Royal Navy but soon found that the strict discipline was unsuited to his disposition. With a considerable amount of money acquired through his family, he decided in 1873 to travel to the British colonies in Australia where he joined his brother at the Malahide property near Fingal in Tasmania.^[2]

In 1874, Ingham bought land in the lower Herbert River valley and established a sugarcane plantation which he named Ings. He used South Sea Islander labour to clear the land, plant the crops and build a sugar mill. A plant disease destroyed his sugarcane crop in 1875, causing up to £60,000 of financial losses for Ingham. He abandoned growing sugar and instead constructed a saw mill and bought a small stern-wheel paddle steamer to ferry goods on the Herbert River and along the coast. The boat was named Louisa.^[2][3]

In 1876, Ingham utilised his vessel to assist Sub-Inspector Robert Arthur Johnstone of the Native Police in his expedition to find a supply route and a suitable port for the Hodgkinson goldfields. This port became known as Cairns. During this expedition, Ingham and Johnstone became the first Britishers to sail up what Johnstone had named the Barron River.^[4]

Ingham established a saw mill and built a wharf at the new port of Cairns.^[5] He also continued to captain the Louisa which made regular trips to the ports of Cooktown and Cardwell.^[2] In his memoirs, Sub-Inspector Johnstone recalled how Ingham placed the mummified remains of an Aboriginal person on the water-tank on board the Louisa which subsequently caused an illness among the passengers. Johnstone had given Ingham the corpse, one of several that he had taken from huts along the coast.^[6]

Acting on reports that gold was to be found in the vicinity of Port Moresby in New Guinea, Ingham borrowed money in early 1878 and chartered a vessel to go there to establish a trading store.^[2] Port Moresby at the time was little more than a missionary outpost and Ingham was one of only a few Europeans to reside there. A large group of prospectors aboard the Colonist arrived at the port in April 1878 and Ingham was appointed as an "agent for Government of Queensland". Although his role had no legal authority he oversaw the registering of land purchases from the Indigenous people, held courts and punished "natives". The British High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, Sir Arthur Gordon, advised that Ingham's role be reined in to avoid embarrassment.^[7]

While in his role as government agent at Port Moresby, Ingham made a series of rules for the prospectors to follow,^[8] and wrote a document on behalf of the local Indigenous leaders claiming that they were begging to be governed as a territory of Queensland.^[9] Ingham tried to place himself in a position where if a significant goldfield was established, the Queensland authorities would appoint him to a high-ranking official role in the region. However, gold was not found in great amounts by the prospectors and Ingham's role of government agent soon lapsed and he returned to Cairns.^[2]

In Cairns, Ingham focused his efforts on quickly returning to New Guinea as a trader. He re-floated the Louisa, which had sunk in the muddy shallows of Trinity Inlet while he was in Port Moresby, and renamed the vessel as Voura. He repaired and stocked the vessel and with a crew of five others including artist James H. Shaw, Ingham sailed for New Guinea in September 1878.^[10] On reaching New Guinea, Ingham decided to cruise and explore the delta of the Fly River. Here they had a skirmish with a large number of Indigenous men in a flotilla of canoes, with Ingham having a "pretty lively" time with his Snider–Enfield rifle shooting at those in the canoes and at the community on the shore.^[11]

They arrived at Port Moresby, where Ingham heard of the killing of Captain Edwin Redlich's beche de mer fishing crew at Utian Island (also known as Brooker Island) in the Louisiade Archipelago to the east. Ingham decided that if he could salvage the equipment from this abandoned fishing station, he could go into business as a beche-de-mer producer on a nearby island with little cost. He resupplied the Voura and took on four additional crew members and headed to Utian Island.^[12]