Richard Siddins
At the end of 1807 he became master of the King George; later he was employed as captain of the Campbell Macquarie by the ship-owner Joseph Underwood.
In the book Richard Siddins of Port Jackson,[6] Lyndon Rose describes the details of the journeys by the small band of sea hunters in the first years of Australia's international trade.
Siddins worked mainly for the Port Jackson merchants Lord, Kable and Underwood, ex-convicts who made their fortunes building Australia's export-import trade.
In The Canberra Times Helen Brown, reviewing Lyndon Rose's book,[7] stated that there is no account of Siddins's life before he arrived in Port Jackson, "...because no reliable information could be unearthed.
The letters confirm that Captain Siddins built the Greenwich Pier (or Vaucluse Hotel) and after his death his son Joseph succeeded him as superintendent of the South Head lighthouse.
He was claimed as possibly the most important captain in the history of exploration from the book Log-Books and Journals with maps and illustrations by Ida Lee F.R.G.S and Hon.
:"...perhaps the greatest traveller of them all, who gave so much information concerning early Fiji, and delighted to hold mission services on board his ship in Sydney Harbour, and whom we find later in company with William Smith (mariner) and Robert Fildes in Blythe Bay, New South Shetland.
After many adventures in the Pacific and having survived the shipwreck of Macquarie Island, he became the Port Jackson pilot and later superintendent of the South Head Lighthouse.
In 1811 and in 1812 Siddins returned to India on the Campbell Macquarie and later in that year arrived in Port Jackson with prisoners and a cargo of spirits.
When Siddins landed on Macquarie island in 1812, he met the Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen there.
[13] Richard Siddins returned to Sydney on 20 January with 1700 skins and rigging form the wreck of the Campbell Macquarie.
Also included is a newscutting of the poem 'The Wreck of the Dunbar' by George Ferris Pickering, which features the role of the dog of Joseph Siddins in the discovery of the shipwreck.
[19] His wife died on 9 February 1883, and was buried at Richmond cemetery and his son, Joseph Richard (1823–1891), became a pilot at South Head.
