Fidelia Heard
Diarist and Ship's Passenger · 1822–1895
Who is Fidelia Heard?
Fidelia Reed Heard was an American woman whose shipboard journal produced the first recorded description of Heard Island. Born in 1822, she married Captain John Jay Heard shortly before the couple sailed together on what amounted to a honeymoon voyage aboard the merchant vessel Oriental, from Boston to Melbourne, in 1853. On 25 November 1853, while at sea in the remote southern Indian Ocean, Fidelia and her husband sighted an unfamiliar landmass that appeared on no chart aboard the ship. She climbed on deck with a spyglass to sketch its outline as her husband, watching the same object, pronounced it to be land rather than an iceberg. Her diary entry from that day, comparing the discovery to the nearby, already-charted Desolation Island (Kerguelen), became the earliest surviving eyewitness account of what was later named Heard Island in her husband's honor. She also made the first known drawings of the island. Transcripts of her journal and the Oriental's log, donated to the American Geographical Society in the early 1930s by her grandson and the polar explorer Hubert Wilkins, are now held at the Scott Polar Research Institute Archives at the University of Cambridge. Fidelia Heard died in 1895.
Sources: Fidelia Heard, personal journal (1853), transcript held at Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge · Eric Woehler, 'Heard Island: a history of exploration', Australian Antarctic Magazine, Issue 7, Spring 2004 · Wikipedia, 'Fidelia Heard'