Matthew Flinders · 1814 · sea

Flinders's account of the 1801 to 1803 circumnavigation of Australia, written during six and a half years of detention on Mauritius. He charted the whole coastline in a ship that was rotten before he started, argued in a footnote for calling the continent Australia, and died on the day the book appeared.

1. 1
   Portsmouth

   July 1801, and the Investigator sails to circumnavigate New Holland - a leaky ship, a passport from the French government, and a commander of twenty-seven who had already sailed round Tasmania in a boat eight feet long.

2. 2
   Madeira

   Watering on the way south, and the ship's naturalist Robert Brown beginning a collection that would run to four thousand species, three-quarters of them unknown to European science.

3. 3
   Cape Leeuwin

   December 1801, and the south-western corner of the continent - the beginning of the survey and of the running chart that would become the first complete coastline of Australia.

4. 4
   King George Sound

   A month refitting and botanising, and the first sustained contact with the Menang Noongar - which Flinders records with a care unusual for the period and which the Noongar remember still.

5. 5
   Encounter Bay

   8 April 1802, and a sail sighted coming the other way: Baudin, doing the same survey for France, and the two ships heaving to in mid-ocean so their captains could compare notes.

6. 6
   Port Phillip

   The bay Melbourne would be built on, entered and charted - and left, because Flinders was surveying and had no orders to found anything.

7. 7
   Port Jackson

   Sydney, refitting, and then north with the Investigator already rotten - the ship surveyed by carpenters who reported she would not last twelve months in fine weather.

8. 8
   Torres Strait

   The reef passage north of Cape York, found and charted - the shortcut that would save the Australia trade weeks, and the piece of work Flinders was proudest of.

9. 9
   The Gulf of Carpentaria

   The great northern bay surveyed in a ship taking water faster than the pumps could clear it - and the decision, made here, to finish the circuit rather than turn back.

10. 10
    Kupang

    Timor, for supplies, and the dysentery that would kill a third of the crew on the passage home - the Investigator condemned at Sydney and never sailed again.

11. 11
    Wreck Reef

    Homeward in the Porpoise, wrecked on an uncharted reef - and Flinders sailing a six-oared cutter seven hundred miles back to Sydney to fetch help, which he did in a fortnight.

12. 12
    Mauritius

    Ile de France, called at in a schooner not knowing the war had resumed - and detained by the governor for six and a half years, during which he wrote the book and lost his health.

13. 13
    London

    19 July 1814. A Voyage to Terra Australis is published, with the name Australia argued for in a footnote - and Flinders dies the same day, at forty, without having seen a copy.