Born March 16, 1774,
Lincolnshire, England
Died July 19, 1814,
England
Matthew Flinders was inspired to go to sea as a young boy when he read Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s classic novel about the adventures of a shipwrecked sailor. His real-life career as a navigator and chart-maker turned out to be just as dramatic as any novel: he was shipwrecked, taken prisoner, and survived a 700-mile voyage in a small boat across an open sea. Flinders served under some of the great heroes of English sea lore before charting the south coast of Australia, sailing around the continent of Australia, and proving that Tasmania was an island.
Flinders was born on March 16, 1774, in Lincolnshire, England. After entering the navy at the age of 15 he served as midshipman on a ship commanded by Captain William Bligh that sailed to Tahiti; he also fought with Admiral Horatio Nelson’s forces against the French. He was then sent to the colony of New South Wales in Australia.
In 1795 he served as a junior officer aboard the Reliance, where he befriended George Bass, the ship’s surgeon. Both men were amateur exploring enthusiasts, so when they sailed into Sydney harbor they decided to explore the dangerous coast of Australia. For this purpose they bought an 8-foot boat they named the Tom Thumb. Soon after their arrival in Sydney they ventured south to Botany Bay and rowed up the Georges River. When the Reliance made a brief excursion to Norfolk Island in 1796, the two British officers made another trip south. This time they explored Lake Illiwarra, a large lagoon on the coast south of Sydney where the city of Wollongong is now located.
In 1798 Flinders was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. During February of that year, when he was entrusted with the task of rescuing some stranded sailors, he explored the Furneaux Islands north of Tasmania and made a second trip to Norfolk Island. In the meantime his friend Bass had traveled south to Tasmania and had come back with the theory that it was an island, not a part of the mainland. Flinders and Bass confirmed the theory when they traveled south on a boat called the Norfolk from October 7, 1798, to January 12, 1799. They sailed westward through the strait that separates Tasmania from the mainland and then went completely around Tasmania in a counterclockwise direction. The strait was named Bass Strait, marking the surgeon’s last exploring trip. Following their return, Flinders made a trip north to what is now Queensland.
In March 1800, Flinders returned to England on the Reliance. While he was there he wrote an account of his explorations with Bass. He also married a young woman from his native Lincolnshire and requested permission to take her back with him to Australia; permission was denied. On the recommendations of Joseph Banks (see entry), the famous naturalist and president of the Royal Society, Flinders was given a new assignment: the task of surveying the southern coast of Australia. He would not see his wife again for nine years.
On July 18, 1801, Flinders left England as captain of the 334-ton sloop the Investigator. Accompanying him was John Franklin, his nephew by marriage, who would later head major expeditions to the Canadian Arctic. They first sighted land at Cape Leeuwin in extreme southwestern Australia on December 6, 1801. The Investigator then sailed to King George Sound, which had been discovered by George Vancouver (see separate entries) and was the site of the town of Albany. Following the coast of the Great Australian Bight, a bay on the Indian Ocean, Flinders sailed eastward. On February 20, 1802, he reached Spencer Gulf, a large indentation in the south coast that extends far into the interior of Australia. This was an important discovery because no one had any idea what the interior was like, and Flinders thought it possible that this great bay might cut all the way into the middle of the continent or even divide it into separate islands.
The possibility of finding a passageway into the interior of Australia was an exciting one. Flinders noted in his journal that he had the “prospect of making an interesting discovery.” However, he was quickly disappointed: the gulf rapidly narrows and stretches only 200 miles or so into what is now the state of South Australia. As was Flinders’s practice as he proceeded along the coast, he named the main geographical features after Royal Navy colleagues and supporters and he chose place-names from his home in Lincolnshire.
When Flinders reached the upper end of Spencer Gulf he took the ship’s boat to explore the shoreline. Accompanying him were William Westall, a landscape draftsman; Ferdinand Bauer, a painter of plant and animal specimens; and Robert Brown, a biologist who would collect specimens of nearly 4,000 species during the course of the expedition. The party went ashore north of the modern town of Port Augusta; during their explorations they climbed to the top of Mount Brown in the Flinders Ranges.
Sailing south out of Spencer Gulf, Flinders sighted a large island across the Investigator Strait. While the island had no human inhabitants, it supported a large population of whales, seals, and kangaroos; in fact it would later become the center of Australia’s fisheries industry. Flinders’s party was able to hunt enough kangaroos to furnish meat for the expedition for four months. In honor of their food supply Flinders named the island Kangaroo Island. The party then sailed into Gulf St. Vincent, where the city of Adelaide is now located; once again Flinders was not able to find a route to the interior.
On April 8, Flinders sighted the sails of a ship that belonged to a rival French expedition commanded by Nicolas Baudin. Carrying out a mission similar to Flinders’s, Baudin had been working his way westward along the south coast. Despite the tensions between England and France, Flinders and Baudin had a friendly breakfast meeting. Flinders named the spot where they met Encounter Bay. The two expeditions then continued on their separate ways: Flinders to Sydney and Baudin to Kangaroo Island and then west to Spencer Gulf.
On April 16, 1802, Flinders reached the site of modern-day Melbourne, which had actually been seen by another British captain some ten weeks earlier. He entered Sydney Harbor on May 9. Remarkably for that era, no one on board was sick with scurvy when they arrived. Flinders stayed in Sydney for a while before setting out again on the Investigator on July 22, 1802. He hoped to complete James Cook’s nautical chart of the east coast of Australia. Unlike Cook, Flinders was able to find a passage through the Great Barrier Reef at the northern end of the coast, and he sailed through the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea to the Gulf of Carpentaria.
At this point the Investigator was leaking badly, and it turned out that many of the timbers were rotten. Since the ship could not fight its way back against the wind down the east coast, Flinders decided to travel west all the way around Australia. This last-minute detour proved to have historic results: when Flinders returned to Sydney on June 9, 1803, he became the first person to circumnavigate Australia.
The Investigator was beyond repair, so Flinders set sail as a passenger on the Porpoise, a captured Spanish vessel. Flinders had a greenhouse erected on the ship deck to hold his plant collection, which was being sent to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, England. Seven days out of Sydney, the Porpoise hit a reef and sank. Flinders undertook a task that proved his navigational skills: he piloted the ship’s small boat back to Sydney through 700 miles of open sea.
Flinders started out once again for England on a small ship, the Cumberland. When the ship began to leak in the Indian Ocean he was forced to land on the French island of Mauritius on December 17, 1803. Since hostilities between France and Great Britain had resulted in war, Flinders was taken prisoner. The French governor refused to recognize the authority of Flinders’s letter of protection from the French emperor on the grounds that it applied only to the Investigator. In spite of efforts in England and orders from Paris, the governor held Flinders for six and a half years.
During his captivity Flinders worked on the journals of his expedition. Finally, just before Mauritius was captured by the British, he was released on June 14, 1810. When he reached England on October 23, 1810, his health was ruined. Flinders lived only long enough to see the account of his voyage published: Voyage to Terra Australis was issued on July 18, 1814; he died the following day at 40 years of age.
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