Pioneers in Australasia

by Harry Johnston

With Flinders on board the Investigator was a young midshipman (his cousin) of the name of John Franklin, long afterwards to become a governor of Tasmania and to achieve deathless fame as one of the great Arctic pioneers.

In 1800 there was dispatched from France another scientific expedition for the exploration of Australia. This was under the command of Captain Nicolas Baudin, and consisted of two ships, Le Géographie and Le Naturaliste, and contained twenty-three geographers, zoologists, and draughtsmen; but owing to bad arrangements in regard to her supplies of food the crews of the two ships suffered to a horrible extent from scurvy before they reached Australia, and indeed might have perished but for the assistance they received from the British settlement at Port Jackson (Sydney). This French expedition also explored the southern coast of Australia, but, with the exception of about 160 miles of coast which it was the first to examine, added little to geographical knowledge as regards priority of discovery, though for a long time Captain Louis de Freycinet, the mapmaker who accompanied Baudin, posed as having been the first to map much of the Tasmanian and South Australian coasts. It is evident that his commander, Baudin, or Freycinet himself, had borrowed and copied the charts made by Flinders, and had amused themselves by giving the names of French personages to many a bay, promontory, and island already discovered and named by the British.

In the autumn of 1802 Flinders, having completed his survey of the whole south coast of Australia from Cape Leuwin to Sydney, started once more in the Investigator to complete his circumnavigation of the island continent. He made a careful exploration of the Great Barrier Reef, and then proceeded to explore the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria. After a brief rest at the Island of Timor the Investigator sailed round the west and south coasts of Australia and once more reached Port Jackson in 1803. Flinders had thus been the first commander to circumnavigate Australia and to prove that it was an undivided area, and that there were no more surprises or mysteries in its outline.

Whaling in the South Seas

Flinders left Port Jackson again in August, 1803, to proceed to England in H.M.S. Porpoise, which was accompanied by a merchant vessel, the Cato. But both these vessels struck a coral reef about 800 miles north from Port Jackson and were completely wrecked. The crews managed to land in safety on a small sand-bank only 4 feet at most above high-water mark, and here they were obliged to camp under a blazing sun with all that they could save in the way of provisions and important papers. Flinders, getting into a six-oared boat with a few seamen, actually rowed and sailed 800 miles across the sea back to Port Jackson, obtained a small vessel there, returned to the reef, and brought off safely all the officers and men who had been left there. In this same vessel, the Cumberland, a schooner of only 29 tons, he started for England with ten seamen and a collection of papers, charts, and geological specimens. In this little unseaworthy vessel he actually sailed across the stormy Indian Ocean and reached Mauritius, where he put in for rest and refreshment.

Mauritius at that time—December, 1803—was still in the possession of the French. Although Flinders had been granted a French passport when he left England in the Investigator, the Governor of Mauritius refused to recognize this as he was no longer in that ship. This Governor-General Decaen—on the contrary, put Flinders in prison, charging him with being a spy, and seized all his papers and charts. But although these last were kept from him until the close of 1807, and one of his logbooks was never returned to him, it is now shown that they were not made use of in compiling the atlas for the report of Baudin's expedition. What the French had borrowed from him was due to his friendly communications when the two expeditions met on the south-east coast of Australia.

Nevertheless, Flinders was detained more or less as a prisoner in Mauritius, eating his heart out, for nearly seven years. He reached England in October, 1810, after Mauritius had been surrendered to a British fleet. His treatment by the Government of his country on his return to England staggers one with its heartless ingratitude. The first circumnavigator of Australia—who had encountered perils which only a heroic spirit could have overcome, who had nevertheless taken the utmost care of the health of those serving under him, and had consequently had little loss of life to report, who had really by his presence on the Australian coasts at many points on different occasions assured to his mother country undisputed possession of that continent by forestalling the expeditions of France, who had traversed the Indian Ocean from Torres Straits to Mauritius in a little boat of 29 tons—was given no reward or honour, and was told that his long imprisonment in that island had barred him from all promotion. He settled down to work for the Admiralty at Portsmouth, and he devoted himself with unceasing industry to the compilation of a book describing his explorations and reproducing his original charts of the Australian coastline. On the very day on which this book was published—in July, 1814—Flinders died, only forty years old. His constitution had been greatly impaired, not so much by the incidents of his circumnavigation of the Australian coast as by the long and unhealthy imprisonment in Mauritius; and his health was undoubtedly further affected by the utter lack of recognition which his great journey met with on the part of the British Government.

Soon after the fall of Napoleon, in 1815, the French Government again sent out exploring expeditions to the Pacific, and each one caused fresh British settlements on the Australian coasts and on those of New Zealand. This last region had been visited at the close of the eighteenth century not only by Captain Vancouver but by Spanish and even Russian ships, while the infant marine of the United States, chiefly interested in whaling enterprise, were attracted to New Zealand on account of the abundance of seals and whales on its coasts or in the adjacent waters of the Pacific. They found in New Zealand (which in spite of occasional episodes of savage anger against the white man, and cannibalism, was becoming more and more used to trade and the settlement of the white man) a useful base for their operations, and their attention was directed not merely to the obtaining of oil from whales and seals, but to the value of the New Zealand flax and timber.