Earl of Aberdeen

A carte-de-visite portrait of the Scottish peer and sailor George Hamilton-Gordon, who became the 6th Earl of Aberdeen in 1864. He clearly didn't like being the Earl of Aberdeen very much. He assumed the name George Osborne and entered a naval college in Boston, subsequently becoming a captain in the United States Merchant Marine. He later settled in Richmond, Maine, where he took jobs cutting ice and clerking in a store. As a sailor, he often shipped out of Richmond. His profession was not entirely unknown to his family at home, as he occasionally wrote letters to his mother and brother. Travelling from Boston to Melbourne on the Hera in 1870, he was washed overboard during a violent storm and drowned. It was reported he was swept away when attempting to take down the boom sail, which he could have ordered another man to do. His younger brother had been killed in a rifle accident two years earlier, so Lord Aberdeen was succeeded by his next youngest brother, John.

Photographed by R. Brown (location unspecified, but possibly Richard Stuart Brown of Edinburgh).