May 11

Belfast-born Dr David Walker (80), surgeon, naturalist and photographer on Captain F.L. McClintock’s expedition to the Arctic (1857–9) which discovered the remains of Sir John Franklin and his crew, died in Portland, Oregon. Though barely twenty years old at the time and with no nautical experience, Walker acquitted himself with distinction on McClintock’s famous expedition. Apart from looking after the crew, protecting them from scurvy, he conducted numerous scientific observations and experiments, using instruments provided by the Royal Society, and collected a huge quantity of flora, fauna and geological specimens. He also took some of the earliest photographs of the Arctic, using the captain’s primitive camera. On his return he was much honoured. Elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Linnean Society, he also wrote the scientific appendix for McClintock’s best-selling account of the voyage. And then, just a few years later, he totally disappeared from that world. In 1865, after an expedition to British Columbia to collect flora specimens, he crossed the border and signed up as an army surgeon with the US Cavalry, then engaged in the Indian Wars on the north-west frontier. Fourteen years later he left the army and became resident doctor and US government land registrar in the infamous Californian gold-mining town of Bodie, and ten years after that moved to Portland, Oregon, where he continued as a doctor. There was no mention of his passing in the British or Irish press. His funeral was private, the local newspaper recording that he had often asked that no display of any sort be made ‘after the sunset call came and his soul passed out to sea’.