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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