Cook, Bligh, Flinders, And Franklin. What Flinders Learnt In The School Of Cook:

Comparison between the healthy condition of his crew and the scurvy-stricken company on the French vessels.

On April 7, 1802, His Majesty's ship Investigator, 334 tons, Commander Matthew Flinders, was beating off the eastern extremity of Kangaroo Island, endeavouring to make the mainland of Terra Australis, to follow the course of discovery and survey for which she had been commissioned. The winds were very baffling for pursuing his task according to the carefully scientific method which Flinders had prescribed for himself. He had declared to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, before he left England, that he would endeavour so to explore the then unknown coasts of the vast island for which he himself afterwards suggested the name Australia, "that no person shall have occasion to come after me to make further discoveries."* (* Flinders to Banks, April 29, 1801, Historical Records of New South Wales 4 351.) This principle of thoroughness distinguished his work throughout the voyage. Writing thirteen years later, after the long agony of his imprisonment in Mauritius, he said that his "leading object had been to make so accurate an investigation of the shores of Terra Australis, that no future voyage to the country should be necessary" for the purpose; and that had not circumstances been too strong for him, "nothing of importance should have been left for future discoverers upon any part of these extensive coasts."* (* Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis 2 143.) Nobody can study Flinders' beautiful charts without recognising them as the work of a master of his craft; and so well did he fulfil his promise, until the debility of his ship and a chain of misfortunes interposed to prevent him, that the Admiralty charts in current use are substantially those which Flinders made over a hundred years ago.* (* Sir J.K. Laughton in Dictionary of National Biography 19 328.)

His method, though easy enough to pursue in a modern steamer, comparatively indifferent to winds and currents, was one demanding from a sailing ship hard, persistent, straining work, with unflagging vigilance and great powers of endurance. It was this. The Investigator was kept all day so close along shore that the breaking water was visible from the deck, and no river mouth or inlet could escape notice. When the weather was too rough to enable this to be done with safety, Flinders stationed himself at the masthead, scanning every reach of the shore-line. "Before retiring to rest," he wrote, "I made it a practice to finish the rough chart for the day, as also my astronomical observations and bearings." When darkness fell, the ship hauled off from the coast, and every morning, as soon after daylight as possible, she was brought in-shore again, great care being taken to resume the work at precisely the point where it was suspended the night before. "This plan," he wrote, "to see and lay down everything myself, required constant attention and much labour, but was absolutely necessary to obtaining that accuracy of which I was desirous."

Before Flinders reached Kangaroo Island, he had, in this painstaking manner, discovered and mapped the stretch of coast westward from the head of the Great Australian Bight, charted all the islands, and, by following the two large gulfs, Spencer's and St. Vincent's, to their extremities, had shattered the theory commonly favoured by geographers before his time, that a passage would be found cleaving the continent from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Strait which George Bass had discovered in 1798.* (* Pinkerton, in his Modern Geography (1807) volume 2 588, published after Flinders had made his principal discoveries, but before the results were known, reflected the general opinion in the passage:

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