Dr. Wheelhouse accompanied Lord Lincoln on his tour of the Mediterranean, Bosphorus and Levant as surgeon on the 168 ton fore-and-aft rigged schooner 'Gitana' crewed by eleven men with two cooks, a steward and a valet. This 'fair copy' journal probably made soon after the voyage includes, on forty-five pages, descriptions of his attempts both successful and disappointing to 'take sketches' with his Talbotype apparatus. He describes being arrested while attempting to make 'sketches' of the market place in Cadiz from the ramparts. His apparatus was mistaken for that of an engineer recording information for military plans for which the offence was High Treason and the punishment death. On p. 101 he describes his introduction on November 3, 1849 to Rev. Bridges in Valetta, I was this morning introduced to Mr. Bridges and find him an extremely agreeable and pleasant person - a clergyman and moving in the first society here. He showed me many beautiful talbotypes from Naples - Pompeii - Rome - Etna....a more interesting collection of Talbotypes I should think few men have as yet got together. Yet Mr. B complains of want of success! and tells me that so far I am succeeding better than he ever did... He showed me the tent in which he works - barely large enough to contain him and his apparatus, and yet so zealous is he that he lived in it for a whole fortnight in the crater of Mount Etna. He had many fine views also of Constantinople....in obtaining them, he was constantly being mobbed by the Turks, who at last smashed his apparatus, and half murdered him.
Dr. Wheelhouse is credited with being one of the first British subjects to make a successful photographic tour to Egypt and the Holy Land. Examples of his work are extremely rare, and little is known other than an album in the collection of the Royal Photographic Society containing later albumen prints from the calotypes and including anecdotal captions. This diary is exceptional in providing a detailed written record of the tour of an important amateur 'talbotypist' from the pioneering period of topographical photography.