Matthew Flinders - Terra Australis: Matthew Flinders Great Adventures in the Circumnavigation of Australia

M atthew Flinders is the man who gave Australia its name. He was also the first circumnavigator of the continent. Monuments commemorating Flinders exploits can be found in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and in many places where he touched the coast. Even his cat Trimthe first feline circumnavigator of Australiahas been graced with a statue, which can be seen perched on a window sill outside the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

Under the acclaim, however, lies a complex individual, one who made his own destiny. Driven, sometimes arrogant and occasionally reckless, Flinders was not always likeable, nor could he always see anothers point of view. His early death deprived us of knowing him in the kind of dignified maturity that so enhanced the reputations of James Cook and Joseph Banks. To the reader Flinders is eternally the dashing man of action, his rash youth both an attraction and a cause for lament. Few navigators had a greater share of misfortune than he did.

Flinders was also dogged by a powerful rival in the form of Captain Nicolas Baudin, who was sent by Napoleon to chart the Australian coast in one of the greatest expeditions of the nineteenth century. The French circled the continent in the corvettes Astrolabe and Gographe, carrying the most capable savants and the best scientific materials of the age. Flinders, in contrast, had to make do with a series of unseaworthy vessels and a limited scientific staff. The French returned to Paris with tens of thousands of specimens, and their reports were illustrated with some of the finest natural history art ever produced on a voyage of discovery. Flinders, after falling into the orbit of his nemesis, Governor de Caen of Mauritius, reached England nearly seven years after departing from Australia with little more than an incomplete set of his notes and charts. In a sense he is the archetypal Australian herostruggling against seemingly impossible odds yet somehow overcoming themeven if triumph was to prove elusive during his lifetime.

Matthew Flinders was born on 16 March 1774 at Donington, Lincolnshire. He came from a long line of doctors and in preparation for taking up the family vocation Matthew was sent to grammar school where he studied Greek and Latin. At fifteen he was summoned home for initiation in the mysteries of physic. Despite his fathers careful planning, the staid routine of the country surgeon did not suit young Matthew. Instead he read Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe by stealth, as such material was evidently not approved of in the Flinders family.

The book gave him his calling. He would go to sea and embark on a life of adventure and exploration. But how should he begin? He wrote to a cousin, John Flinders, then in naval service in the West Indies, who offered the practical advice that he should study Euclid & Robertsons Elements & to make himself acquainted with Moores Navigation. The adolescent Flinders eagerly pursued this course, and in 1789 felt he had progressed sufficiently to present himself as a naval volunteer to Captain Sir Thomas Pasley, then aboard the Scipio at Chatham. Another of Flinders cousins was working for the captain and may have provided an introduction.

Flinders was put on the quarter-deck and in August 1791 set sail in the Providence on one of the most celebrated naval expeditions of the late eighteenth centuryBlighs second voyage to Tahiti in quest of breadfruit seedlings to carry to the West Indies as food for slaves. Unlike Blighs first expedition to Tahiti aboard the Bounty, the voyage of the Providence