Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/511

 originally intending to farm, but instead settled at Toronto, graduating B.A. at the university there, and also passing in law. After a brief practice at the Canadian bar, he in 1863 became a stipendiary magistrate and superintendent of rivers and creeks in an up-river district of British Guiana. Transferred to a coast district including extensive sugar estates, which were worked largely by means of East Indian and Chinese 'coolie' labourers, imported under a careful system of indenture and under close government supervision, Des Vœux, new to the conditions, and a somewhat ardent liberal, conceived that the 'coolies' were grievously oppressed by the planters. He was reluctant, as magistrate, to enforce 'the Draconic laws against the coolie indentured labourers,' and rather demonstratively took the part of the labourer against the employer, thereby incurring though not to the extent which he imagined the hostility of the planters and the distrust of the government. Relations became so strained that he asked for a transfer to another colony, and was sent as administrator to St. Lucia in 1869. From his new post he at once wrote to Lord Granville of what he regarded as the grievances of the 'coolies' in Guiana. He himself afterwards characterised his letter as 'defective,' 'written in great haste,' and 'without notes to refresh his memory.' 'The Times' described it as 'the severest indictment of public officers since Hastings was impeached.' A royal commission of inquiry was appointed and Des Vœux was recalled to Guiana to prove his case. The commission corrected certain genuine abuses in the labour system, but Des Vœux failed to prove what he afterwards admitted to have been an view.

Des Vœux returned to his duties in St. Lucia, 'depressed,' as he says, 'by a sense of personal failure,' although the colonial office did not condemn him. At St. Lucia he reorganised and codified the old French system of law in force there, put right the island finances, and started a central sugar factory.

In 1878 he left St. Lucia and acted for about a year as governor of Fiji during the absence on leave of Sir Arthur Gordon (afterwards Lord Stanmore). Des Vœux carried on with success Sir Arthur's task of creating the first British crown colony in the South Sea Islands, and after a visit home, during which he was appointed governor of the Bahamas (1880) but did not take up the post, he, on the retirement of Sir Arthur Gordon in 1880, returned to Fiji as actual governor and as high commissioner of the Western Pacific. These posts he filled with credit till 1885. He was governor of Newfoundland in 1886 and of Hongkong from 1887 till his final retirement from the service in 1891.

Thenceforth Des Voeux lived quietly in England, chiefly in London. He published his autobiography, 'My Colonial Service,' in 1903, a pleasant, gossipy book, containing much of interest on colonial administration. He was made G.C.M.G. in the same year. He died in London on 15 Dec. 1909.

Des Voeux, while on sick leave, married, on 24 July 1875, Marion Denison, daughter of Sir John Fender [q. v. Suppl. I], by whom he had two surviving sons and two daughters.

 DETMOLD, CHARLES MAURICE (1883–1908), animal painter and etcher, son of Edward Detmold, electrical engineer, by his wife Mary Agnes Luck, was born at Putney on 21 Nov. 1883. Together with his twin brother, Edward Julius, who shared in every stage of his artistic development, he was distinguished by extreme precocity. The two began as children, living at Hampstead, to draw and study animals in the Zoological Gardens and Natural History Museum, and they exhibited at the Royal Academy while still in their fourteenth year. On the advice of Burne-Jones they were not sent to any art school. They were profoundly influenced by Japanese art, and developed a style in which a searching study of natural forms, especially of the plumage of birds, was always subordinated to decorative arrangement. In 1897 both brothers began to etch, and in 1898 had made sufficient progress to issue jointly a portfolio of eight etchings of birds and animals. In 1899 a volume of coloured reproductions of their drawings was published by Dent under the title 'Pictures from Birdland.' In the same year appeared the first of a series of etchings executed jointly by the two brothers, each working on the same plate, which continued at intervals till 1906. Maurice produced in all ten etchings and two woodcuts in collaboration with Edward, and twenty-five etchings executed entirely by himself, though in part from drawings by his brother. Many of the brothers' etchings are immature, but the technical ability displayed in the best of them, especially