When Flinders Was Appointed To The Command Of The Investigator, He Was
Only Twenty-Seven Years Of Age.
But he had already won distinction by his
demonstration that Bass Strait was a strait, and not a gulf, a fact not
proved by George Bass's famous voyage from Sydney to Westernport in a
whale-boat.
His circumnavigation of Tasmania - then called Van Diemen's
Land - in the Norfolk; the discovery of the Tamar estuary and Port
Dalrymple; some excellent nautical surveying among the islands to the
north-west of Tasmania; and an expedition along the Queensland coast, had
also earned for him the confidence of his official superiors. His ardour
for discovery, and the exact, scientific character of his charts and
observations, won him a powerful and steadfast friend in Sir Joseph
Banks, who had been with Cook in the Endeavour in 1768 to 1771, and never
lost his interest in Australian exploration. At the beginning of his
naval career Flinders had tasted the "delights of battle." As a
midshipman on the Bellerophon (Captain Pasley), he played his small part
on the "glorious first of June" (1794), when "Black Dick," Lord Howe, won
his greatly vaunted victory over the French off Brest.
But before this event his tastes and aspirations had set in the direction
of another branch of the naval service. A voyage to the South Seas and
the West Indies under Bligh, in the Providence, in 1791, had revealed to
his imagination the glory of discovery and the vastness and beauty of the
world beyond European horizons.
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