William Cotton Oswell (27 April 1818 – 1 May 1893) was an English explorer in Africa and other areas. He was born in

Leytonstone Leytonstone () is an area in east London, England, north-east of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Waltham Forest, a local authority district of Greater London. It adjoins Wanstead to the north-east, Forest Gate to the south-east, ...

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and Grea ...

and attended

Rugby School Rugby School is a public school (English independent boarding school for pupils aged 13–18) in Rugby, Warwickshire, England. Founded in 1567 as a free grammar school for local boys, it is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain. ...

. In 1837 he secured a position with the

East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and South ...

in Madras through his uncle John Cotton, who was a director of the company. He spent ten years there, learning

Tamil Tamil may refer to: * Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils **Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia * Tamil language, nativ ...

and other languages and studying surgery and medicine. He was sent to

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

for health reasons, and explored the

Kalahari desert The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa extending for , covering much of Botswana, and parts of Namibia and South Africa. It is not to be confused with the Angolan, Namibian, and South African Namib coastal d ...

in Bechuanaland (now

Botswana Botswana (, ), officially the Republic of Botswana ( tn, Lefatshe la Botswana, label= Setswana, ), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory being the Kalaha ...

) and located

Lake Ngami Lake Ngami is an endorheic lake in Botswana north of the Kalahari Desert. It is seasonally filled by the Taughe River, an effluent of the Okavango River system flowing out of the western side of the Okavango Delta. It is one of the fragmented remn ...

. He participated in expeditions to the

Zambezi The Zambezi River (also spelled Zambeze and Zambesi) is the fourth-longest river in Africa, the longest east-flowing river in Africa and the largest flowing into the Indian Ocean from Africa. Its drainage basin covers , slightly less than hal ...

river with

David Livingstone David Livingstone (; 19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873) was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, and pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, an explorer in Africa, and one of the most popular British heroes of t ...

; one of Livingstone's children, born in Botswana in 1851, was named William Oswell Livingstone. On another expedition he became the first European to see Mumbuluma Falls and Kalambo Falls in what has since become

Zambia Zambia (), officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central, Southern and East Africa, although it is typically referred to as being in Southern Africa at its most central point. Its neighbours are t ...

. He returned to England in 1853 and performed medical duties during the

Crimean War The Crimean War, , was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between Russia and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia. Geopolitical causes of the war included the ...

. In 1855–56 he traveled in North and South America. In 1860, he married his wife Agnes, settled in

Groombridge Groombridge is a village of about 1,600 people. It straddles the border between Kent and East Sussex, in England. The nearest large town is Royal Tunbridge Wells, about away by road. The main part of the village ("New Groombridge") lies in t ...

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

, and had five children. The species '' Rhinoceros oswellii'' was named for him (this name is no longer used in modern taxonomy). Livingstone described Oswell as having had lucky escapes, having been tossed by a rhinoceros on two occasions.

Family

Through his grandfather

Joseph Cotton Joseph Cotton Jah Walton (born Silbert Walton, 1957, St. Ann, Jamaica) is a reggae singer active since the mid-1970s. Biography After spending a year working in the Jamaican police force, Walton turned to recording, initially working with J ...

(1746–1825), William Cotton Oswell was a cousin of the judge Henry Cotton and a

first cousin once removed Most generally, in the lineal kinship system used in the English-speaking world, a cousin is a type of familial relationship in which two relatives are two or more familial generations away from their most recent common ancestor. Commonly, ...

Henry John Stedman Cotton Sir Henry John Stedman Cotton, (13 September 1845 – 22 October 1915) had a long career in the Indian Civil Service, during which he was sympathetic to Indian nationalism. After returning to England, he served as a Liberal Party Member of P ...

. William Cotton Oswell's wife's father's mother Willielmina Cornthwaite was the sister of Ann Cornthwaite, the mother of the mother of Rev. Prof. Baden Powell, the father of the first Lord Baden-Powell, who wrote"Sketches in Mafeking and East Africa" (Smith, Elder & Co., 1907, p. 87) about "my cousin William Cotton Oswell", who was actually the husband of his father's second cousin. For more, see http://www.halhed.com/t4r/getperson.php?personID=I2171&tree=tree1

References

External links

* http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/cgi-bin/res.pl?keyword=William+Oswell&offset=0 {{DEFAULTSORT:Oswell, William Cotton 1818 births 1893 deaths English explorers English hunters People from Leytonstone People educated at Rugby School People from Groombridge Nathaniel Cotton family

Family

See also

References

External links