Surveyor
His next ship was the ageing 4-gun wooden paddle sloop Salamander, which he commanded from 1865. Although he had served in the steam-assisted Conqueror over ten years previously, this was his first paddle steamer, and in a further departure, she was employed in surveying duties on the east coast of Australia. His duties involved keeping the communications between Sydney and Cape York in the furthest north point of Queensland open. On the long journeys between he conducted surveys of the Great Barrier Reef. The county of Nares in Queensland was named after him. His next appointment was to the brand new Philomel-class gunvessel Newport, which he commissioned and took to the Mediterranean for survey work, including a survey of the Gulf of Suez, accessed by the newly-opened Suez Canal.
In recognition of his work in the Gulf of Suez, Nares was promoted to the rank of captain in 1869. He commissioned Shearwater in 1871 for the Red Sea, and on the outward voyage the ship conducted studies of the water currents in the Straits of Gibraltar for William Benjamin Carpenter, a biologist who believed that density differences between water masses generated ocean currents.
Read more about this topic: George Nares