The independent mapping of the coastline by Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin, and reports to governments and learned societies in both England and France, awakened interest in the possibilities of European settlement in Australia, particularly free settlement, unencumbered by the shadows of religious restraint and economic disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, the trickle of information that circulated eventually swelled to a point where colonial settlement became inevitable.
This is why Matthew Flinders is a household name in Adelaide today, where he looms almost as large as Captain James Cook. Flinders’ discovery and careful mapping of the long and tortuous ‘unknown coast’ of the great southern continent, one of the remaining few pieces of coastline in the world to be mapped, gives him a special place in the minds of all South Australians.
He was an extraordinary naval hero of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries who was the first (in 1804) to call the continent ‘Australia’. On this basis alone, the reason for his inclusion in the catalogue of street names in Adelaide needed little discussion. Just as street names give a city a detailed map and bearings to find a specific locality, Flinders’ charts of the South Australian coastline gave Colonel William Light and the first colonists in Adelaide a sense of place in the world and an anchorage for their new home.
At the Street Naming Committee meeting, Flinders Street was paired with Franklin Street on the northern corners of Victoria Square, where they run east and west to the terraces. This was a deliberate decision because Sir John Franklin, Matthew Flinders’ step-cousin, was also on the HMS Investigator as one of Flinders’ midshipmen on several of his historic voyages of discovery. Franklin was also well known to several members of the Street Naming Committee at the time they sat. Flinders died prematurely in 1814, giving Flinders Street the distinction of being the only one of 62 streets and squares named posthumously.
The hand of Matthew Flinders is indelibly etched along the southern coast of South Australia. In Terra Australis, his magnum opus, he carefully details the scientific results of his expedition.
Matthew Flinders was born to Matthew Flinders Snr and Susannah (nee Ward) in Donington, Lincolnshire, on 16 March 1774. His father was one of a three- generational line of surgeons in the area. Matthew Flinders Snr expected his son to carry on the family interest in medicine. However, young Matthew let it be known that he wanted to somehow join the navy and go to sea. After three years at Horbling Grammar School and by age 15 he had mastered enough examples requiring mathematical proof and numerical logic to launch into three of the works of study considered necessary for a career in the navy. Without leaving the family home and without a tutor to assist, he spent the next twelve months studying Euclidean geometry, John Robertson’s The Elements of Navigation and Hamilton Moore’s book on navigation. These gave him a more than competent familiarity with these complex sciences.
His entree to the service came via a cousin, a governess for Captain Pasley (afterwards Admiral Sir Thomas Pasley). Flinders was invited to stay overnight at Pasley’s estate. The captain was so astonished and impressed with the young man’s knowledge that Flinders’ naval career began soon after as a Lieutenant’s servant on the HMS Alert. After serving under Bligh in 1791, Flinders again joined Pasley on the HMS Bellerophon and saw battle against Napoleon on the Glorious First of June in 1794.
In the last years of the eighteenth century Matthew Flinders decided he would seek glory in the annals of geographical discovery and set sail on various expeditions to Terra Australis.
In 1801, he gave notice of his meticulous abilities as an author and map-maker in a publication of his observations of the south-eastern coast of the continent. The publication resulted in a successful appeal to Sir Joseph Banks for patronage to further explore the ‘unknown coast’ of Australia, in which he was given charge by the Admiralty of a 334-ton ship, the Investigator, promoted to Commander and accompanied by scientists, and a crew he handpicked.
On 17 April 1801, shortly before the expedition set sail, Flinders rather hastily but entirely voluntarily married Ann Chappelle, at Partney. She had been linked romantically with Matthew since 1794. Flinders planned to take his new wife with him on the voyage and made preparations for her to stay in the captain’s quarters. Unfortunately, when inspecting the ship before departure, someone from the Admiralty found her in the cabin without her bonnet. It was considered most inappropriate. The Admiralty took umbrage and Ann was not permitted to go. Flinders, only days into his marriage and amid tears of anxiety and painful lamentation, decided to go ahead alone, assuring his wife he loved her deeply and promising to write often.
Fate was to deal Annette Flinders a poor hand in marriage, and although she eventually bore Matthew a daughter, who was conceived after he eventually returned to England, he died just two years afterwards, in 1814. Matthew was 40. Ann died in 1852.
Flinders and his crew on the Investigator reached that part of the Great Australian Bight still to be mapped on 28 January 1802. They landed at what Flinders called Fowler’s Bay, after his First Lieutenant. Sailing eastwards he noted a magnificent harbour at a place he called Port Lincoln, after his home county. He called it Boston Harbour, after the township of Boston near the east coast in Lincolnshire and mere kilometres from his family village at Donington. Here the coastline turned abruptly to the left, and for a few days as he ventured northwards Flinders dared for a moment to think that the Gulf of Carpentaria might be a long strait extending all the way southward to the great Southern Ocean and separating what had been known as Terra Incognito into two large land masses. Instead, he found himself at the head of a gulf which he named after Lord Althorp, the Earl of Spencer.
Flinders discovered and named Spencer Gulf in February 1802, Gulf St Vincent in March 1802 and ‘Kanguroo’ Island towards the end of March. On 8 April the now famous meeting between Matthew Flinders and the French Captain Nicolas Baudin took place at Encounter Bay, just around from the bluff at what is now called Victor Harbor. In the first days of May, Flinders was back at Port Jackson.
On instructions from the Admiralty to circumnavigate the whole continent again, Flinders encountered trouble with the ships on which he sailed.Deciding it best to proceed back to London with a view to fitting out another ship so he could continue with all of the Admiralty’s original instructions, he joined the HMS Porpoise, as a passenger, and with two other government vessels, the Cato and the Bridgewater, they began to make their way homeward. Tragedy struck and the ships sank. On a six-oared cutter from the Porpoise,Flinders, taking command, rowed back to Port Jackson.
England-bound and taking command of a small government schooner, the Cumberland proved barely seaworthy and with little choice Flinders set a course for the French possession of Mauritius, where he unexpectedly found himself imprisoned on the island as a spy. The Governor, General Charles Decaen, one of Napoleon’s most trusted leaders, could not be convinced of the nature of Flinders’ discoveries. Flinders languished on the island for six-and-a-half years, until 1810, even though orders from Paris for his release were given by French headquarters in 1806.
Matthew Flinders eventually received the acclaim which he had craved for so long. On his return to England he visited with Lord Spencer, who had authorised the expedition. Sir Joseph Banks presided over a dinner held in his honour by The Royal Society, and Captain Bligh accompanied him into the presence of the Duke of Clarence, later to be King William IV, who had asked to meet with him. The Duke made a careful inspection of Flinders’ charts and offered his warmest congratulations. At that point, neither he nor an ailing Flinders could have foreseen there would later be a city of Adelaide in which the central thoroughfare would be named after King William IV, and that a Flinders Street would spring eastwards from it.
For most of his 40 years Matthew Flinders was in good, vibrant health, although his eventual incarceration on Mauritius finally wore him down. The firmness of character and a piercing expectation of others, especially those under his command, were characteristics to which he confessed.
Despite the onset of illness in his last years, Matthew Flinders punished himself mercilessly in pursuit of a written account of his voyages. His monumental A voyage to Terra Australis was published the day before he died – 19 July 1814. His mortal remains were laid to rest in the churchyard of St James, on Hampstead Road in London.
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