John Buyers
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John Buyers was the British first officer of the
Sir Richard Phillips. On the same day, Taenga
was discovered and named Holts Island. Some other islands were sighted but they had been previously discovered and were not landed on. Once in Tahiti, Turnbull set up an establishment ashore for buying pigs and salting them down with the salt obtained in the Hawaiian Islands.
Margaret, under Buyers, set out to trade for hogs with the neighbouring islands, but ran onto a reef in the Palliser Islands and was wrecked. Buyers and his crew, after considerable hardship, managed to reach Tahiti on a roughly constructed barge made of planks from the wreck. A ship which called at Tahiti afforded passage to Sydney for both Turnbull and Buyers. They left Sydney on 16 March 1804, in Calcutta and reached England via Cape Horn. Though a financial failure, the voyage obtained interesting information about the Society and Hawaiian Islands and the discovery of the islands Margaret, Phillips, and Holt in the Tuamotu Archipelago.
References
- ^ John Turnbull (1805). A voyage round the world: in the years 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804, in which the author visited the principal islands in the Pacific Ocean and the English settlements of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island. Vol. 1. R. Phillips by T. Gillet.