Sextant

by David Barrie

  Flinders sailed via the west coast, choosing not to risk the much shorter but more hazardous route back through the Torres Strait in the teeth of the strong northeasterly trade winds. Shortage of fresh provisions obliged him to stop at Cupang, which—like Batavia—was a most unhealthy place. By the time he reached Port Jackson six months later, in June 1803, having thereby completed the first circumnavigation of Australia, the ship and many of her crew were in a desperate state. Several men had already died of dysentery picked up in Timor, many others were seriously ill, and Flinders himself was so disabled by sores caused by scurvy that he could no longer go aloft—as his surveying work frequently required. An examination of the Investigator revealed that there were thirteen timbers in her starboard bow “through any of which a cane might have been thrust.” Flinders reflected that during their recent passage along the south coast of Australia, the strong southerly breezes had providentially heeled the ship to port. Had the wind set in from the north, “the little exertion we were then capable of making at the pumps could hardly have kept the ship up; and a hard gale from any quarter must have sent us to the bottom.”

  Writing to Ann, Flinders thanked her for the letters that had greeted him on his arrival at Port Jackson, and gave her news of the further deaths among the crew, his own ill health, and all the problems he now faced. He then poured out his heart to her:

  Thou hast shewn me how very ill I have requited thy tender love in several instances. I cannot excuse myself, but plead for respite until my return when in thy dear arms I will beg for pardon, and if thou canst forgive me all, will have it sealed—oh with ten-thousand kisses. . . .

  Implicitly acknowledging that his ambition had kept them apart, Flinders apologetically assured Ann that

  so soon as I can insure for us a moderate portion of the comforts of life, thou wilt see whether love or ambition have the greatest power over me. Before thou wast mine, I was engaged in this voyage;—without it we could not live. Thou knowest not the struggle in my bosom, before I consented to the necessity. There was no prospect of a permanent subsistence but in pursuing what I had undertaken, and I doubt not but that it will answer its end.46

  Chapter 13

  Flinders—Shipwreck and Captivity

  Day 14: A grey dawn but still a fair wind and making 5 knots. Colin announced that we were halfway. The bread from Halifax has now turned almost entirely green so breakfast was scrambled eggs mixed with the remaining edible crumbs—surprisingly good. Seas still pretty lumpy so we stayed under No. 1 stays’l. Barometer still falling.

  Colin complimented me on my sextant work today and let me do the mer alt and noon fix on my own: 44°23' N, 30°36' W.

  Depression came through in afternoon. Low cloud, wind going round into SW and then rain and strong squalls as the warm front moved through. Force 6 to 7 but it quickly kicked up an uncomfortable sea. Wind later veered to W and started to ease though skies still thick with cloud. Finally, during the night, the wind veered to N.

  During night Colin and I were up and down making several sail changes. Little sleep.

  Having recovered his strength, and consulted the governor—Philip Gidley King (1758–1808)—Flinders set sail again in August 1803 aboard the small armed vessel Porpoise, in the hope of obtaining a new survey ship when he reached England, no suitable vessel being available in Port Jackson. The Porpoise was accompanied by two larger ships, both merchantmen—the Cato and the Bridgewater. On the way Flinders planned to extend his earlier examination of the Torres Strait and also to demonstrate that this route was reasonably safe by leading the two other ships through it. But luck was not on Flinders’s side. Long before they reached the Torres Strait, the Porpoise and the Cato were wrecked on an isolated and uncharted coral reef lying several hundred miles off the coast of Queensland. As Flinders was technically a passenger, he was not called when, during the night, breakers were seen ahead. By the time he reached the deck it was too late to save the ship:

  On going up, I found the sails shaking in the wind, and the ship in the act of paying off; at the same time there were very high breakers at not a quarter of a cable’s length [150 feet] to leeward. In about a minute, the ship was carried amongst the breakers; and striking upon a coral reef, took a fearful heel over on her larboard beam ends. . . .

  Our fore mast was carried away at the second or third shock; and the bottom was presently reported to be stove in, and the hold full of water. When the surfs permitted us to look to windward, the Bridgewater and the Cato were perceived at not more than cable’s length distance [200 yards]; and approaching each other so closely that their running abord [sic] seemed to us inevitable. This was an aweful moment: the utmost silence prevailed; and when the bows of the two ships went to meet, even respiration seemed suspended. The ships advanced, and we expected to hear the dreadful crash; but presently they opened off from each other, having passed side by side without touching. . . . Our own safety seemed to have no other dependence than upon the two ships, and the exultation we felt at seeing this most imminent danger passed, was great, but of short duration; the Cato struck upon the reef about two cables length from the Porpoise, we saw her fall over on her broadside, and the masts almost instantly disappeared; but the darkness of the night did not admit of distinguishing, at that distance, what further might have happened.1

  The Bridgewater narrowly escaped Wreck Reef, but her master, Captain Palmer, to the disgust of his shipmates, made no serious attempt to help the survivors of the two wrecks, claiming on his arrival in India that they must all have been lost. The third mate of the Bridgewater challenged his account, and he, as well as several other officers, then quit the ship. It was lucky for them that they did: Palmer and the Bridgewater never reached home. “How dreadful must have been his reflexions at the time his ship was going down!” Flinders later commented dryly.2

  Luckily the survivors were able to salvage a good deal from the Porpoise—including a sextant, three timekeepers, and Flinders’s log and bearing books, as well as most of his charts and astronomical observations—and they managed to reach a dry sandbank within the reef where they pitched camp. Two of the timekeepers had stopped, but one was still going well.

  When searching for firewood on the first night after they landed, they found a spar and a piece of timber, worm-eaten and almost rotten. The timber was seen by the master of the Porpoise, who judged it to be part of the stern-post of a ship of about four hundred tons; and Flinders thought it might, “not improbably, have belonged to La Boussole or L’Astrolabe”:

  Monsieur de la Pérouse, on quitting Botany Bay, intended to visit the south-west coast of New Caledonia; he might have encountered in the night, as we did, some one of the several reefs which lie scattered in this sea. Less fortunate than we were, he probably had no friendly sand bank near him . . . or perhaps the two vessels both took the unlucky direction of the Cato after striking, and the seas which broke into them carried away all his boats and provisions; nor would La Pérouse, his vessels, or crews be able, in such a case, to resist the impetuosity of the waves more than twenty-four hours. If such were the end of the regretted French navigator, as there is now but too much reason to fear, it is the counterpart of what would have befallen all on board the Porpoise and Cato, had the former ship, like the Cato, fallen over towards the sea instead of heeling to the reef.3

  With characteristic determination, Flinders took charge of the ninety-odd survivors. They had enough food and water to last three months, so Flinders set off on August 26, 1803, in one of the surviving boats (a six-oared cutter with a crew of fourteen in all, given the name Hope) to get help from Port Jackson, 739 nautical miles away. This was a long and perilous journey to make in an open boat, even if it did not match the scale of the voyage Bligh had been forced to undertake. As they pushed off, Flinders recalled, a seaman ran to the makeshift flagstaff on the sandy island, hauled down the ensign, which had earlier been hoisted upside down as a distress signal, and rehoisted it right side up: “This symbolical ex
pression of contempt for the Bridgewater and of confidence in the success of our voyage, I did not see without lively emotion.”4

  The Hope was overladen and soon encountered steep seas that caused her to labor so much that Flinders was forced to lighten her by throwing overboard some of the freshwater, food, and cooking apparatus. On the fourth day, however, they made their landfall on the coast and on September 8 they reached Port Jackson.

  The reader has perhaps never gone 250 leagues at sea in an open boat, or along a strange coast inhabited by savages; but if he recollect the 80 officers and men upon Wreck-Reef Bank, and how important was our arrival to their safety, and to the saving of the charts, journals, and papers of the Investigator’s voyage, he may have some idea of the pleasure we felt, but particularly myself, at entering our destined port.5

  On his unexpected return, Flinders went at once to the governor’s house to organize a rescue mission. Bursting in on King and his family when they were dining, the bearded and sunburned Flinders made a never-to-be-forgotten impression on King’s young son, Phillip.

  Only six weeks after leaving the reef, Flinders returned to Wreck Reef aboard a schooner, the Cumberland, accompanied by a much larger merchant vessel, the Rolla, which happened to have called at Port Jackson on her way to Canton, and another small craft, the Francis:

  On landing, I was greeted with three hearty cheers, and the utmost joy by my officers and people; and the pleasure of rejoining my companions so amply provided with the means of relieving their distress made this one of the happiest moments of my life.6

  The survivors had by then almost given up hope of seeing Flinders again and had already built, out of timbers gathered from the wrecks, a small, decked sailing boat in which they planned to save themselves. Samuel Flinders had devoted much time to fixing the position of the reef by means of lunars. All were now rescued, most taking passage in the Rolla, while some chose to return to Port Jackson either in the Francis or in the newly built boat.

  Flinders himself set sail from Wreck Reef for England in the Cumberland, which was more of a yacht than a ship. She was not a good choice, and Flinders candidly admitted that he was influenced by the wish to be the first to undertake such a long voyage in so small a vessel.7 His crew consisted of ten volunteers from the crew of the Investigator, and he took with him his charts and books, his personal “specimens of mineralogy and conchology,” as well as the instruments originally supplied by the Navy Board and “the sole time keeper which had not stopped.” Still eager to gather hydrographic data, he sailed again through the Torres Strait, but he soon discovered that the Cumberland leaked badly, and that her two pumps were in a poor state of repair: in fact, one pump gave up almost completely after they had entered the Indian Ocean. In these circumstances Flinders recognized that it was far too risky to attempt rounding the Cape of Good Hope—where the strong westerly winds encountering the south-going Agulhas Current throw up steep and dangerous seas—so he decided to seek help from the French authorities on the Isle de France (Mauritius).8 This proved to be a disastrous decision: unknown to him, Britain and France were again at war.

  Flinders was carrying a French passport designed to give the Investigator immunity from any act of war because she was engaged in peaceful, scientific work. However, he was not sailing in the Investigator any longer, and the passport could therefore be deemed invalid. All might have been well, but the exhausted Flinders was disgusted by the suspicious and unfriendly behavior of the French authorities: the contrast with the generous manner in which the British had treated Baudin and his men when they arrived in Port Jackson in 1802 made him all the more furious.

  Nor did it help that the recently arrived governor of the Isle de France, General Charles de Caen, had been frustrated in his perfectly legal attempt to reestablish a French military presence in India during the recent peace. He was a distinguished soldier, whose career had prospered under Napoleon, but now he was marooned on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, far from the action in Europe, with fading prospects and very little to do. De Caen found it hard to believe the astonishing story Flinders told him and seems to have suspected him of espionage. He was also annoyed that Flinders failed to remove his hat in his presence. Unfortunately the captain of Le Géographe—who would no doubt have vouched for Flinders—had sailed just a few days earlier.9 Nevertheless, in a conciliatory spirit, de Caen later sent word for Flinders to join him and his wife for dinner. Every tragic hero has a flaw, and Flinders now revealed his by indignantly turning down the invitation. This was not the best time to indulge his prickly sense of honor, and he was to pay a very high price for his disastrous error of judgment. He later learned that if he had only swallowed his pride he might soon have been released; instead, the affronted de Caen decided to teach the uppity British naval officer a lesson.10

  The heartbreaking result of this spat was that Flinders spent the next six and a half years on the Isle de France as a virtual prisoner, desperately trying by every means at his disposal to persuade the French authorities to let him return home—though his sarcastic letters to the recalcitrant de Caen cannot have helped his cause. Among those in France who petitioned on his behalf was the elderly Bougainville, who, having narrowly avoided the guillotine during the Revolutionary Terror, had found favor with Napoleon and was now in an influential position.11 After an initial period of close confinement, Flinders was eventually allowed to move to a plantation in the highlands, where he lived with a French family who made him very much at home. He took advantage of his enforced leisure to draw the charts of his voyage, to learn French and even Malay—still hopeful that one day he might be able to finish the great task he had begun. He also had the opportunity to visit the estate, near the center of the island, where La Pérouse had lived during his stay on the island in the 1770s:

  I surveyed [the estate] with a mixture of pleasure and melancholy. How happy he had once been in this little spot with his family, and what a miserable fate terminated his existence. This was the spot where the man lamented by the good and well-informed of all nations, the man whom science illumined, and humanity, joined to an honest ambition, conducted to the haunts of remote savages; in this spot he once dwelt unknown to the great world, but happy. When he became great and celebrated, he had ceased to exist. But his labours have not been taken in vain; by his foresight a part at least of the produce of them has been saved to the public, and his example will serve to animate the sincere lovers of science. . . .12

  Flinders arranged for a simple memorial to be placed on the spot where the house had stood, inscribed simply “La Pérouse.” In 1897 it was replaced by a large conical rock on which Flinders’s own tribute was quoted.

  In March 1806 the seventy-seven-year-old Bougainville personally intervened on Flinders’s behalf with Napoleon, and shortly afterward the French government gave the order for his release—“out of a pure sentiment of generosity.”13 But circumstances, including, ironically, a British naval blockade, continued to conspire against Flinders. His correspondence with Ann (of which sadly only his side survives) was inevitably intermittent during the period of his captivity, and this contributed to his sense of isolation. A letter sent to her in December 1806 reveals that he had been deeply depressed:

  It is now my dearest friend fourteen months since the date of thy last letter received here. I much fear that some subsequent ones have been lost or detained. . . . The arrival of thy letters forms the greatest epochs in my present monotonous life, and I sigh for them as for the most desired of blessings; next to the liberation which should permit me to fly to thy arms they afford me the greatest happiness I can receive. . . . Cease not then, my best beloved, to write often if thou wouldst preserve me from distraction. A six months longer silence, without such an increase in my prospects as to give me the strongest assurance of obtaining liberty may, alas,—be productive of disastrous consequences. Such an accession of despair as I experienced in September, would be more than my mind could support.14

&nbs
p; Flinders told Ann that he had even contemplated the drastic step of breaking his parole and making his escape but had rejected the plan because he wanted his honor to remain “unstained.” He was not in fact allowed to leave the Isle de France until June 1810:

  after a captivity of six years, five months and twenty-seven days, I at length had the inexpressible pleasure of being out of the reach of general De Caen.15

  The scientific rigor of Flinders’s approach to chart-making was unprecedented, as the published account of his voyage reveals:

  Longitude is one of the most essential, but at the same time least certain data in hydrography; the man of science therefore requires something more than the general result of observations before giving his unqualified assent to their accuracy, and the progress of knowledge has of late been such, that a commander now wishes to know the foundation upon which he is to rest his confidence and the safety of his ship.16

  Flinders accordingly listed the precise results of the observations by which the longitudes of the most important points on each coast had been fixed, as well as the means used to obtain them. Lunar distances had been particularly important in regulating the timekeepers on which Flinders generally relied for his longitudes:

  The instruments used in taking the distances, were a nine-inch sextant by Ramsden, and three sextants of eight inches radius by Troughton, the latter being made in 1801, expressly for the voyage . . . and each longitude is the result of a set of observations, most generally consisting of six independent sights. They were taken either by Lieutenant Flinders [Matthew’s brother] or by myself. . . .17

  He explains the many corrections applied to these sights and the distances derived from them, including allowances for the “spheroidal figure of the earth” in accordance with the “very latest theory.” But, he adds, these longitudes still required an even more important correction: