by David Barrie
After conducting one more relatively brief survey voyage—this time of the coast north of Port Jackson—Flinders returned to England, arriving home in August 1800. By now he was a lieutenant, and his achievements had already brought him to the attention of the scientific world. The next and most important phase of his career began in January 1801, when, having won the powerful backing of Sir Joseph Banks, Flinders was given command of a small sloop—renamed the Investigator—to complete the survey of the entire coast of the continent for which he was to propose the name Australia.23 The Investigator was “a north-country built ship, of three-hundred and thirty-four tons; and, in form, nearly resembled the description of vessel recommended by captain Cook as best calculated for voyages of discovery.”24 Flinders was only twenty-six years old and it was the job of his dreams, but there was a problem: he had fallen in love with a young woman who lived near his home in Lincolnshire, Ann Chappelle.
Flinders was determined to make a name for himself, but he also wanted to marry Ann: how could the two goals be reconciled? His troubled state of mind is revealed in his letters. After an argument with his father over money, he wrote to Ann on November 29, 1800:
I have thrown away what might have been the means of making thee happy . . . my soul is turned inside out to thee:—fear not to equal my openness. . . . Fortune may favour me, or may turn her back upon me—Heaven knows.25
On December 18, Flinders, worried that he could not provide adequately for her, told Ann that they must remain “two distinct people. . . . Let us then, my dear Annette, return to the ‘sweet, calm delights of friendship.’ . . .”26 After meeting her on January 16, 1801, and doubtful now of her love, he wrote in tears, bidding her adieu, “perhaps the last time.”27 On January 27, in response to a direct question from Ann, Flinders warned that there was only a distant prospect of their ever living together and encouraged her to seek her happiness elsewhere, complaining that he had “undertaken a Herculean task.”28 By April, however, his mood had changed completely. Through the influence of Banks29 he had been promoted to the rank of commander and now saw “the probability of living with a moderate share of comfort.”30 Flinders therefore asked Ann to become his wife, rashly inviting her to sail out to Port Jackson with him—if she could support the hardships of the passage. Though he expressed concerns about the likely reaction of his “great [that is, powerful] friends,” they were swiftly married.
An incident that occurred in May, when Flinders was bringing the Investigator around to Portsmouth from the Thames estuary, discreetly accompanied by his new wife, illustrates the shortcomings of contemporary hydrography—even in the busy waters of the English Channel. While approaching the headland of Dungeness on the south coast of Kent, the ship grounded on a sandbank known locally as “the Roar.”31 This hazard was marked on most contemporary charts, but not, as bad luck would have it, on that with which Flinders had been supplied.32 The conditions were calm, there was a rising tide, and the Investigator suffered no damage before she floated off, but Flinders was deeply embarrassed.
By now the Admiralty had discovered that he had brought his wife aboard, and their lordships took the view that the grounding was due not to a faulty chart, but to the distracting effects of Mrs. Flinders. Ann might perhaps have been able to accompany Flinders on the long outward voyage to Port Jackson—such arrangements were not unheard-of aboard men-of-war when permission had been obtained. However, it would have been unprecedented for the commander of a vessel on a voyage of discovery to take his wife with him, and in any case Flinders had not even sought official approval. In the face of formal complaints from the Admiralty, and the stern disapproval of Banks, Flinders had no choice but to leave behind the woman he had just married. Writing from Portsmouth on June 30, he told Ann: “when thy remembrance assails me too powerfully and my eyes swell at the recollection, I shall retire to the little bed [Flinders’s emphasis], and vent my sorrow to myself alone.”33 They were not to meet again for nine years.
Like Cook’s Endeavour, the Investigator was a flat-bottomed vessel capable of taking the ground safely, though as soon as she was at sea the extent of the leaks revealed that her hull was in poor condition. The ship’s company numbered eighty-eight, and the crew had all volunteered—evidence perhaps of the glamour that surrounded voyages of discovery, and of the high reputation that Flinders had already won. Flinders’s younger brother Samuel sailed as second lieutenant, and one of the six midshipmen was John Franklin, who was to achieve posthumous fame in his disastrously unsuccessful bid to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic in the 1840s. The “supernumeraries” included the landscape artist William Westall, only nineteen at the time, as well as Ferdinand Bauer, who was to make some of the finest botanical and zoological drawings of all time while on the voyage, and Robert Brown, a gifted young naturalist selected by Banks. The East India Company, which had a monopoly on British trade in the Far East and stood to benefit from the navigational data deriving from the voyage, supplied £600 toward the costs of the officers’ food and drink. In addition to the crew there were plenty of livestock: sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens—not to mention two cats, including the captain’s favorite, Trim, who had been born aboard the Reliance and had accompanied him on his earlier surveying voyages.
The Investigator set sail from Spithead (the stretch of water between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight) on July 18, 1801, and after calling at Madeira and the Cape of Good Hope, made her landfall on Cape Leeuwin at the southwestern corner of New Holland on December 6. The “Herculean task” that Flinders had foreseen was now to begin. His instructions from the Admiralty were demanding: “You are to be very diligent in your examination of the [Australian] coast, and to take particular care to insert in your journal every circumstance that may be useful to a full and complete knowledge thereof, fixing in all cases, when in your power, the true positions both in latitude and longitude of remarkable headlands, bays, and harbours, by astronomical observations.”34 Many parts of this coast were still uncharted, and there was considerable uncertainty about the overall shape of the continent—in particular whether it might be divided into two halves, or perhaps even embrace a large inland sea.* Flinders was therefore required to explore any rivers and “examine the country as far inland as shall be thought prudent . . . discovering any thing useful to the commerce and manufactories of the United Kingdom.” Nor was he to forget the needs of science and art: “During the course of your survey, you are to [move] the Investigator onward from one harbour to another as they may be discovered, in order that the naturalists may have time to range about and collect the produce of the earth, and the painters allowed time to finish as many of their works as they possibly can on the spot where they may have been begun.”35
Flinders needed no official encouragement: he had a scientific bent and was determined to raise the standards of hydrography to the highest possible level. Having already shown himself a skillful and daring navigator, over the next two years he painstakingly charted roughly half the coast of Australia. He corrected existing surveys—including, apologetically, some details of those made by the great Cook—and extended them into little-known regions, though he was disappointed not to discover any major inlet that would give access to the interior.36 As far as possible he avoided the “running survey” method. Instead he anchored frequently, and when he went ashore used the theodolite to connect fixed positions by triangulation. He relied heavily on chronometers for his survey work but checked them as often as possible by lunars and sometimes, when ashore, by the moons of Jupiter. On one occasion he observed an eclipse, which proved a useful index of the accuracy of his methods after he had returned home.
Flinders also made an extended series of observations of the strangely erratic behavior of magnetic compasses aboard ship. Their tendency to give different bearings of the same object depending on which way the ship’s head was pointing had long been a mystery and was a matter of great navigational significance. Flinders realized that this “compass
deviation” was due to the influence of magnetic metals aboard the ship, and he devised a means of correcting it that was tested successfully after his eventual return to England. Though it was many years before his proposal was adopted, compensatory “Flinders bars” eventually became a standard feature of steering-compass installations on board every modern ship. Flinders, who kept careful records of the barometric pressure, was also among the first to investigate carefully the relationship between changes in this variable and the behavior of the wind, a study that was to be taken further by another distinguished hydrographer—Robert FitzRoy.
Like so many other voyages of exploration, this one was marked by human tragedy. In February 1802 the master of the Investigator, John Thistle, along with seven other men, was drowned on an expedition in one of the ship’s boats in rough waters off the south coast of Australia. Thistle, who had earlier sailed with Flinders and Bass, was both an old friend and a much-valued colleague. The site of the accident was appropriately called Cape Catastrophe and the grief-stricken Flinders named an island after Thistle.
While the fruitless search for the lost men was under way, Flinders learned that Thistle before leaving home had visited a fortune-teller who had told him that he was going on a long voyage and that his ship would be joined by another vessel after reaching her destination; he, however, would be lost before that happened.37 The superstitious crew of the Investigator were very struck by this prophecy, but Flinders coolly observed that other commanders should discourage their crews from consulting fortune-tellers.
Oddly enough, they did have an unnerving chance encounter with another vessel some weeks later. This was Le Géographe, commanded by the French explorer Nicolas Baudin, who was proceeding along the south coast in the opposite direction. Uncertain of the Frenchman’s intentions, the little Investigator cleared for action and veered around as she passed the larger ship in order to keep her broadside to her. Flinders then hove to and went aboard Le Géographe. It seems to have been a slightly tense encounter. Baudin’s lack of interest in the identity of his interlocutor, or even in his reasons for being in this remote part of the world, plainly nettled Flinders, who could be touchy:
Captain Baudin was communicative of his discoveries about Van Diemen’s Land; as also of his criticisms upon an English chart of Bass Strait published in 1800. He found great fault with the north side, but commended the form given to the south side and to the islands near it [surveyed by Flinders]. On my pointing out a note upon the chart, explaining that the north side of the strait was only seen in an open boat by Mr. Bass, who had no good means of fixing either latitude or longitude, he appeared surprised, not having before paid attention to it.38
The two ships kept company overnight, and the following day Flinders told Baudin, in guarded terms, what the Investigator had been doing, as well as offering him advice about places where he could obtain freshwater and food. Only when the time came to part did Baudin think to ask Flinders for his name:
and finding it to be the same as the author of the chart he had been criticising, [he] expressed not a little surprise, but had the politeness to congratulate himself on meeting me.39
In May 1802 Flinders called at Port Jackson and seized the opportunity to write home to Ann:
A moment snatched from the confusion of performing half a dozen occupations, and of making up eighteen months accounts in every one of them, is a poor tribute to offer to a beloved friend like thee. That I am safe and well, and have done everything thus far that I could have expected to do, is to tell thee something. How highly should I value such short information reciprocated from thee! but alas, my dearest love, I am all in the dark concerning thee, I know not what to fear or what to hope. Pray write and releive [sic] my anxiety.
Flinders reported that Ann would have been comfortable at Port Jackson, and accused “fortune of great unkindness” for denying him the joys of her company. He touched also on financial matters, explaining that he had sent money home to his agent to the value of almost £400:
Thou wilt judge from the above, that notwithstanding the arduous task of being astronomer, surveyor, commander, and inspector of every officer and mans conduct and accounts, that my pecuniary concerns have not been neglected. No, my beloved, thou art concerned in these, and I shall not cease to do every thing for thee, until life, or the requisite power, ceases. I still think that the voyage will be as beneficial to us, as I ever supposed; which was, that I should be fifteen hundred pounds richer at the conclusion than at the commencement of it; this, however, need not be said to every body.40
At Port Jackson he again encountered Le Géographe, whose crew had been reduced to a desperate state by scurvy—only twelve out of 170 men were still fit for duty.41 The governor, with the active assistance of Flinders, did all in his power to help the French sailors, and a dinner was held on board the Investigator to celebrate the news that Britain and France were no longer at war, and to which Baudin and his officers were invited. By now two of the chronometers available to Flinders had stopped, and he was henceforth reliant on the two (by Earnshaw) that were still in good order—a scarcely adequate provision for the challenging survey work that lay ahead along the Great Barrier Reef and the little-known north coast.42 As Flinders proceeded up the coast of what is now Queensland, La Pérouse, who had by then been missing for almost ten years, was much in his thoughts:
At every port or bay we entered . . . my first object on landing was to examine the refuse thrown up by the sea. The French navigator, La Pérouse, whose unfortunate situation, if in existence, was always present to my mind, had been wrecked, as it was thought, somewhere in the neighbourhood of New Caledonia; and, if so, the remnants of his ships were likely to be brought upon this coast by the trade winds, and might indicate the situation of the reef or island which had proved fatal to him. With such an indication, I was led to believe in the possibility of finding the place; and though the hope of restoring La Pérouse or any of his companions to their country and friends could not, after so many years, be rationally entertained, yet to gain some knowledge of their fate would do away the pain of suspense: and it might not be too late to retrieve some documents of their discoveries.43
Flinders found no clues and carried on to make detailed observations in the Torres Strait before turning south to explore the Gulf of Carpentaria. This was arduous, time-consuming, and not very rewarding: there were no proper harbors, no rivers of any significance—in fact, there was nothing much of use to anyone, apart from the occasional turtle to brighten up the dinner menu. The climate was oppressively hot and humid (one man died of sunstroke), there were occasional clashes with the natives, and they were plagued by mosquitoes and flies. Reading between the official lines it is also clear that Flinders’s younger brother, Samuel, was a trial: on several occasions he committed the grave sin of allowing the two chronometers to run down, thereby necessitating lengthy delays while they were freshly rated. Charting the whole gulf coast with such care must have been gruelling work, but little flashes of humor nevertheless brighten up Flinders’s account. He came across some small red crabs, with one claw nearly as big as their bodies (presumably some kind of fiddler crab), and was amused “to see a file of these pugnacious little animals raise their claws at our approach, and open their pincers ready for an attack; and afterwards, finding there was no molestation, shoulder their arms and march on.”44
In November 1802, while on the gulf coast, Flinders took the precaution of careening the leaky Investigator and made the shocking discovery that her hull was in a state of almost terminal decay. A written report from the master and the carpenter left him in no doubt that the voyage would have to be curtailed:
I cannot express the surprise and sorrow which this statement gave me. . . . My leading object had hitherto been to make so accurate an investigation of the shores of Terra Australis that no future voyage to this country should be necessary; and with this always in view, I had ever endeavoured to follow the land so closely that the washing of the sur
f upon it should be visible, and no opening, nor anything of interest, escape notice. Such a degree of proximity is what navigators have usually thought neither necessary nor safe to pursue, nor was it always persevered in by us; sometimes because the direction of the wind or shallowness of the water made it impracticable, and at other times because the loss of the ship would have been the probable consequence of approaching so near to a lee shore. But when circumstances were favourable, such was the plan I pursued, and, with the blessing of GOD, nothing of importance should have been left for future discoverers upon any part of these extensive coasts.45
Now, however, Flinders was in no doubt that the Investigator could not survive heavy weather at sea, and that there would be no hope of repairing her if she sustained serious damage on any of the “numerous shoals or rocks upon the coast.” Even if constant fine weather could be relied on and all accidents avoided, the ship could not be expected to stay afloat for more than six months. Flinders concluded bitterly that “with such a ship” he had no chance of accomplishing the task he had been set: he had no choice but to return to Port Jackson in the forlorn hope of finding there a new vessel in which to complete his mission.