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Description
Matthew Flinders would not normally be thought of as a bookish man but reading his private journal one might think again. Books were important to him not only in his work--he was, as an explorer, continuing the work of his predecessors, most of whom had published accounts and maps of their voyages--but also as recreation, stimulation, and sometimes solace.
Flinders reports in Voyage to Terra Australis that, on 22 May 1801, the Navy Board sent various items on board the Investigator:
Amongst the [articles] for our own use and convenience ... were most of the books of voyages to the South Seas, which, with our own individual collections, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, presented by the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks, formed a library in my cabin for the use of all the officers. (1)
The Encyclopedia was later to play an important part in one of the dramas of Flinders's career. In 1803, when approaching Mauritius for emergency repairs to the Cumberland, he had only the map of Mauritius in the Encyclopedia Britannica to navigate by. Sir Joseph Banks would most likely have provided the third edition, published in 1797. This work must have seemed almost miraculous at the time. The first edition of 1771 was in three volumes; the second, in 1783, in ten, and the third edition had increased to eighteen. In a long journal entry of 18 August 1805, Flinders mentions that he read the articles on wind, weather and meteorology. (2) A comparison of the first edition's short, bemused and uninformative paragraph on 'Weather' with the nearly fifteen pages on the same subject in the third edition, gives an idea of the rapid increase in knowledge of the natural world during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a development of which Flinders himself was part. His major achievement was the mapping of large tracts of the Australian coastline, written up in A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), and in 1801 he published his Observations on the Coasts of Van Diemens Land, on Bass's Strait and its Islands, and on Part of the Coasts of New South Wales. He made two other significant contributions to the science of navigation; while on Mauritius he wrote a paper on the uses of the marine barometer, based on his observations at sea, which was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1806. Back in England in 1812, he conducted experiments on the interference with compass readings caused by a ship's iron, a subject which had been on his mind, understandably, throughout his career as a navigator. His experiments were written up in the Naval Chronicle in 1812 and led to the invention of the Flinders bar: a device to correct the errors caused by magnetism.
Among the other books Flinders had in his cabin on the Investigator was Milton's Paradise Lost, written in 1667. Nearly two years after their painful separation so soon after their marriage, he wrote to his wife Ann, telling her of the... |
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