Sextant

by David Barrie

  In this melancholy situation, we remained, expecting relief from the returning flood, which to our inexpressible joy was at length announced by the floating of the shoars, a happy indication of the ship righting. Our exertions to lighten her were, however, unabated, until about two in the morning; when the ship being nearly upright, we hove on the stern cable, and, without any particular efforts, or much strain, had the undescribable satisfaction of feeling her again afloat, without having received the least apparent injury.22

  Very shortly afterward, as the two ships continued to thread their way through a narrow, rock-strewn passage that became increasingly intricate, it was the Chatham’s turn to run aground. After a very anxious night, the Chatham eventually floated, showing little sign of damage, but the expedition had been very lucky: both ships had nearly been lost. Vancouver nevertheless pushed farther north into Fitz Hugh Sound, encountering a British vessel that brought terrible news from Nootka Sound: the commander of the store ship Daedalus—a personal friend of Vancouver’s—and the astronomer Gooch, as well as another crew member, had all been murdered by natives at Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.

  In the light of this grim development, Vancouver cut short his northerly explorations and headed south, reaching Nootka on the seaward shore of Vancouver Island at the end of August. Here he soon established warm relations with the Spanish governor, the splendidly named Don Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra. Negotiations over the status of the Nootka settlement were conducted amicably, though inconclusively, and the governor asked Vancouver to name “some port or island” after them both “to commemorate our meeting and the very friendly intercourse that had taken place and subsisted between us.” Vancouver suggested that the island on which they had first met was the perfect candidate and so they agreed that it should be called “the island of Quadra and Vancouver.” As Spanish influence declined, Quadra’s name was later quietly dropped, though it remains attached to a small nearby island.

  While at Nootka, Vancouver heard from the master of an American trading vessel (the Columbia) that a large river reached the sea somewhere south of Cape Flattery, and decided to inspect it himself while sailing south to extend his survey of the Californian coast. The entrance to the Columbia River is a very dangerous place, protected by extensive shoals on which the Pacific seas break heavily. Evening was drawing in as the Discovery and the Chatham warily made their approach with a following breeze. A strong ebb tide setting out to sea gave them an easy means of retreat if the need arose, and the Chatham, having a shallower draft, was in the lead under the command of William Broughton. As they drew near to an apparently continuous line of breakers the soundings diminished alarmingly, and Vancouver prudently decided to turn back and spent a very uncomfortable night at anchor in the confused seas off the entrance. Broughton, however, pressed on through the white water in the gathering darkness, losing one of the ship’s boats in the process. It was not immediately clear to Vancouver that the Chatham was safe, and he had to wait until the following morning before he saw her riding at anchor, inside the line of breakers. Vancouver’s further efforts to bring the Discovery into the river were in vain, and he concluded that it was inaccessible to ships of more than four hundred tons burthen. Broughton sailed upriver, soon being forced by the shoaling water to take to an open boat, and travelled a hundred miles or so upstream before returning to his ship. Although the full extent of the river remained unknown, it was now clear that it did not offer a practicable route for commercial traffic.23

  Vancouver’s laborious survey work continued until the summer of 1794, by which time he had, in accordance with his orders, charted the whole American Pacific coast from 30 to 60 degrees North, thereby finally eliminating the possibility that a passage to the Atlantic through the North American continent might somewhere exist. He had also surveyed the main islands of the Hawaiian group, which—as he shrewdly recognized—occupied what was now a key strategic and commercial location. The warm relationship that Vancouver developed with the most powerful Hawaiian chief resulted in the ceding of these islands to Great Britain, though Vancouver received few thanks for this diplomatic coup on his return home in October 1795, and little advantage was taken of it.24

  Vancouver sailed over 65,000 miles in four and a half years, and the ships’ boats covered 10,000 miles—often under oars. Only five men died, and none of disease, though Vancouver’s own health had steadily worsened. By the time he turned for home he had probably spent more time in the Pacific than any other European,25 but his country was now at war with France, and although Vancouver was promoted to post-captain, his extraordinary achievements received no other public recognition. Physically unable to take another command, he had to make do with half pay and soon found himself in financial difficulties. Sharp disagreements with the troublesome botanist who had sailed with him—appointed by Sir Joseph Banks—also put the luckless Vancouver on the wrong side of Banks, a man conscious of his exalted status as president of the Royal Society.

  Vancouver’s greatest trials, however, arose from the malice of Thomas Pitt, who had now inherited his father’s title and great wealth. While laboriously writing the account of his long voyage, Vancouver was surprised to receive a letter from the new Lord Camelford challenging him to a duel. He quite properly responded by saying that the captain of a ship was not “called upon in a private capacity to answer for his Public conduct in the exercise of his official duty”—a judgment supported by, among others, Lord Grenville, the foreign secretary, who happened also to be Pitt’s brother-in-law. Pitt then arrived in person at the Star and Garter Hotel on Richmond Hill, where Vancouver was living, and berated him. When Vancouver suggested that the propriety of his actions be tested by a senior naval officer, Pitt threatened to “drive him from the Service . . . compel him to resign his commission, and . . . wherever he should meet him, box it out and try which was the better man.” True to his word, Pitt attacked Vancouver with his cane on a chance encounter in a London street, an episode that attracted the attention of the press. The famous cartoonist James Gillray published a scurrilous print making fun of Vancouver entitled “The Caneing in Conduit Street,” and Banks too weighed in, complaining that Pitt and the other midshipmen had been badly treated by their captain. The whole vendetta might almost have been ridiculous had it not been so cruelly unjust.26

  Pitt’s subsequent career was, to say the least, inglorious. After murdering a fellow officer in the West Indies—an action for which he suffered no punishment—he returned to England and in 1798 was arrested while trying to reach France in a hired boat with a letter of introduction to a leading member of the French government. Since the two countries were at war, this was a capital offense, but Pitt was pardoned after appealing to King George III. In 1804, however, his luck ran out when he challenged an army officer to a duel over a “strumpet.” Knowing him to be a good shot, Pitt—outrageous to the last—fired before the signal was given. He missed, and was then fatally wounded by his opponent’s bullet.27

  In steadily failing health, Vancouver struggled to finish his book and had almost done so when he died in May 1798, a month short of his forty-first birthday. His brother saw the three volumes through the press, but though reprinted they did not cause much of a stir, and Vancouver’s extraordinary career and achievements were soon largely forgotten, overshadowed by those of Cook. Vancouver is buried in Petersham churchyard at the foot of Richmond Hill in southwest London. The eventual restoration of his grave with its plain headstone resulted not from the zeal of his fellow countrymen, but from that of the citizens of Vancouver. A gilded statue of Vancouver adorns the Capitol Building in Victoria, British Columbia, commemorating the man who first surveyed the province’s long and rugged coast.

  Chapter 12

  Flinders—Coasting Australia

  Day 13: Wind shifted overnight to S by W giving us good speed on 080° at last. Colin accidentally woke me an hour early at 0300 but a beautiful golden dawn made up for it. Sunrise longitude by chronometer—
34° W. More cloud building up in the west and barometer falling—it looks as if we may be in for more heavy weather.

  Passed by a white cargo ship with a big Fyffes banana logo sailing on the same course at 0700—the Jamaica Planter. Again failed to make contact on radio-telephone but someone waved from the bridge, which was friendly.

  Wind strengthened to force 4 from South so we reefed the main. Still making 6 knots on a beam reach—excellent. Noon position—43°18' N, 33°22' W.

  Slight freshening of the wind brought us down to No. 1 stays’l at 1500 and at the same time we replaced some more of the sliders on the mainsail bolt rope. Lots of sunshine but barometer falling slowly.

  William Bligh now reenters our story, as the mentor of a young man who was to be one of the leading maritime explorers of his generation. Once the court-martial of the mutineers was over, Bligh was free to resume normal duties—and to finish the job he had started in the Bounty. In 1791 he sailed once again for Tahiti via the Cape of Good Hope and the south coast of Australia in the Providence. The ship’s company this time included a midshipman named Matthew Flinders. Having collected the long-delayed supply of breadfruit seedlings, Bligh had to decide how best to deliver them to the West Indies. The most direct route—around Cape Horn—was ruled out on the grounds that the delicate tropical plants would not survive the cold. So Bligh sailed westward, but instead of taking the relatively safe and well-known passage around the north of New Guinea, he decided once again to thread his way through the Torres Strait.

  This was audacious, given that he was now sailing not in a shallow-draft open boat, but in a far less maneuverable square-rigged ship. Apart from Cook, no one had attempted this feat since Torres himself in 1606, and there were as yet no detailed charts. The whole area is dotted with coral reefs and low islands, through which the tides run strongly, making it exceptionally hazardous for sailing ships. Flinders was later to write that perhaps “no space of 3½ degrees [of longitude] in length presents more dangers than the Torres Strait,” but—taking all due care—Bligh sailed through it safely, brushing off fierce attacks by the natives of Papua New Guinea on the way.1 Even today large parts of the Torres Strait—away from the main safe passages—remain uncharted.

  The breadfruit were delivered to St. Vincent and Jamaica in good condition (though the experiment was not a success, as the African slaves, for whom they were intended, seem not to have liked them), and Flinders returned to England in 1793. He had assisted Bligh in preparing charts and making astronomical observations, but their relationship deteriorated during the latter part of the voyage. The reasons are not clear, though if, as some believe, Flinders—in common with more than a quarter of the crew—contracted a sexually transmitted disease in Tahiti, his commander would certainly not have been pleased.2 In any case, Flinders was convinced that Bligh had a “prepossession” against him, and he later suspected him of taking credit for his labors.3

  Flinders was born in Lincolnshire in 1774 and was inspired to become a sailor by reading Daniel Defoe’s tale of Robinson Crusoe.4 That he had already studied Euclid’s geometry and two manuals of navigation by the time he joined the Royal Navy in 1789 at the age of fifteen is a measure of his determination to succeed. He served first as a midshipman in the famous seventy-four-gun Bellerophon under Captain Thomas Pasley, an influential figure who was to take a close interest in his career,5 before being appointed to the Providence.6

  After serving with Bligh, Flinders renewed contact with Pasley, and again joined the Bellerophon, this time as an aide-de-camp. In this capacity he saw action in the running battle with the French fleet known by the British as the Glorious First of June (1794). The Bellerophon was severely damaged and Pasley lost a leg, but Flinders himself survived the carnage unscathed: it was his only experience of naval warfare, and he emerged from the action with credit.7 The appointment of John Hunter as governor of the recently established colony of New South Wales now gave him the opportunity to return to the land that would before long be known as Australia.8

  In February 1795, Flinders—still only a midshipman—sailed with Hunter in the Reliance, reaching Port Jackson in September. He was, he later wrote, led “by his passion for exploring new countries, to embrace the opportunity of going out upon a station which, of all others, presented the most ample field for his favourite pursuit.”9 His devotion to the practice of celestial navigation was already well established and he kept a careful note of his personal sextant observations on the outward passage. Soon after arriving in Port Jackson he launched the first of a series of coastwise surveying expeditions with his new friend George Bass, a fellow Lincolnshire man, who had sailed out with him in the Reliance as ship’s surgeon.

  Bass, aged thirty-two, was a commanding figure with a “penetrating countenance,” and Flinders—no milksop himself—described him as “one whose ardour for discovery was not to be repressed by any obstacle or deterred by any danger.” Together the two young men decided to complete as far as possible the exploration of the east coast of “New South Wales”—a term that was then applied indiscriminately to the whole eastern half of Australia. Initially there was no official support for this ambitious undertaking, but Bass had brought out from England an eight-foot dinghy, and it was in this ludicrously small craft—named Tom Thumb—that he and Flinders, accompanied by an unnamed “boy,” set out from Port Jackson. It is hard to imagine how they all fit into such a small boat. Their first trip took them only as far as Botany Bay, but from there they travelled some distance up George’s River, breaking new ground, and their “favourable report” to Governor Hunter led to the establishment of a new settlement called Banks’ Town—in honor of Joseph Banks.10

  A longer and even more adventurous boat trip in Tom Thumb followed in March 1796. This took them farther south, where they had an alarming encounter with a group of aborigines, who they feared might be cannibals. While their gunpowder—which had been soaked—was drying, Flinders entertained the natives by clipping their hair and beards as a way of avoiding trouble:

  Some of the more timid were alarmed at a formidable instrument coming so near to their noses, and would scarcely be persuaded by their shaven friends, to allow the operation to be finished. But when their chins were held up a second time, their fear of the instrument,—the wild stare of their eyes,—and the smile which they forced, formed a compound upon the rough savage countenance, not unworthy of the pencil of a Hogarth.11

  Having narrowly escaped being lost in a gale, they returned safely to Port Jackson in April 1796. Official duties, including a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope by way of Cape Horn—a circumnavigation they treated almost as routine—kept both men busy for some time, but Bass was able to conduct further inland forays, and in December 1797 he obtained leave to make a longer seaborne expedition to the south, this time without Flinders. He set off in a twenty-eight-foot whaleboat, supplied and victualled by the governor, with a crew of six sailors. At this date it was unclear whether Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) was an island, and Bass headed south in the hope of settling the matter. By January 2, 1798, having already travelled well over four hundred nautical miles, he reached the southernmost point of Australia—later named Wilson’s Promontory in honor of a friend of Flinders—but there were heavy seas and the boat was leaking badly. So instead of turning south toward the north shore of Van Diemen’s Land, he clung to the mainland coast, taking sextant sights to fix his position. Eventually he reached Western Port, just failing to discover the wide bay of modern Melbourne, a few miles farther to the west.12 The long southwesterly swell, and the strength of the tides, strongly suggested to Bass that the stretch of water between him and Van Diemen’s Land was a strait that connected with the open sea to the west.13 However, the poor condition of the boat and shortage of food obliged him to head for home, and he reached Port Jackson again on February 25 after enduring a series of heavy gales. Though the positions reported by Bass turned out to be inaccurate, Flinders excused him on the grounds that his sextant had
probably been damaged.14 He later wrote:

  A voyage especially undertaken for discovery in an open boat, and in which six hundred miles of coast, mostly in a boisterous climate, was explored, has not, perhaps, its equal in the annals of maritime history.15

  The phrase “especially undertaken for discovery” was presumably a concession to the extraordinary boat journey of his former commander, Bligh.

  Since Bass had not yet conclusively proved that the body of water now named after him was indeed a strait separating Van Diemen’s Land from the mainland, in October 1798 Flinders and Bass—together once again—set off to settle the matter in a small twenty-five-ton sloop, the Norfolk, with a crew of eight volunteers. Unfortunately, it was impossible to obtain a chronometer, so Flinders had to rely entirely on lunars to determine their longitude.16

  Making meticulous sextant observations to fix his position at every opportunity, and surveying every useful anchorage or harbor, Flinders led the expedition through the islands at the eastern end of the straits and along the northern shore of Van Diemen’s Land, where they discovered Port Dalrymple17 and explored the Tamar River (now the location of the town of Launceston).18 When they reached the northwestern tip of the island, they encountered a long swell from the southwest, which they hailed “with joy and mutual congratulation, as announcing the completion of our long-wished-for discovery of a passage into the southern Indian Ocean.”19 Flinders sailed down the inhospitable west coast of Van Diemen’s Land and spent some days exploring the Derwent River, at the head of the extensive natural harbor on the south coast discovered in 1792 by d’Entrecasteaux on his voyage in search of La Pérouse.20 On the basis of Flinders’s favorable report, a new colony was established there four years later, known today as Hobart. By January 12, 1799, the Norfolk had returned to Port Jackson, and at Flinders’s request the governor named the newly discovered strait after George Bass.21 The new passage was of more than purely geographical interest: it significantly reduced the time taken by ships sailing out to Sydney* since they could now avoid the long detour around the south coast of Van Diemen’s Land. The two friends were soon separated, and Bass—who had by then left the navy—disappeared in mysterious circumstances after undertaking a trading voyage from Port Jackson to South America in 1803. According to one rumor, he was captured by the Spanish colonial authorities and condemned to the mines on suspicion of smuggling. Whatever the truth, Bass was never heard of again.22