van der Meer Biographical Record
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Biographical Record
Willem van der Meer
Born 19 Jan 1838 · Died 5 Jun 1872
Occupation: Marine Surveyor
Cause of Death: Struck by lightning at the summit of a hill while taking magnetic observations in an advancing storm. His instruments had been behaving strangely for two days. Rather than retreat, he had gone higher, to find out why. The needle of his compass was found fused to its housing.
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Van der Meer was hired to make the shipping lanes safer and he did — the charts he produced were used for forty years and saved a great many lives. But he had a constitutional inability to ignore anything of interest. Sent to measure a channel, he would measure the channel, and then measure the tide, and then note the birds, and then spend a week finding out why the birds did whatever birds do.
His employers found him exasperating. His journals are magnificent.
Around 1866 his commissioned surveys begin sharing the page with weather and geology, and then with something he only ever refers to as the deposits: concentrations of bone in the marsh and cave systems of the leeward coast, laid down in numbers he could not account for. He measured them thoroughly with the exact bearing and the exact date but he offered no interpretation. He did not need to. Anyone reading the entry for [DATE REDACTED] arrives at the same thought van der Meer plainly arrived at, and he leaves you to have it by yourself.
The journals went to a university, then to a private collection, then — for reasons the Society regards as very slightly miraculous — into the hands of a young field naturalist from Victoria, who read them in one sitting and immediately began arranging passage to Mauritius.