This is the first biography of an extraordinary man whose name has been for many years a byword for notorious failure. Writers and historians have consistenly labelled him as efficient, indolent and careless. Peel's initial Swan River scheme to bring out hundreds of migrants with their stock and equipment and settle them on the land may have been too ambitious, but his subsequent thirty five years in the colony, when, in his own peculiar way, he did more than most settlers to help his development have also been largely ignored by historians and should be recorded.