Oceania & Pacific · Modernised and illustrated edition
A Voyage to Terra Australis
Modernized, illustrated English edition of A Voyage to Terra Australis by Matthew Flinders (1803-1804).
Shipwrecked in the Coral Sea, he reaches Sydney in an open boat and ends up a prisoner of the French.
Read more ↓- about 190 pages
- Paperback
- English
- 19th century
Countries covered: Australia · Mauritius · Indonesia · Timor-Leste
About this book
July 1803. His ship condemned, Matthew Flinders leaves Port Jackson as a mere passenger aboard the Porpoise, bound for England. On 17 August, in the dead of night, the Porpoise and the Cato are smashed on a reef lost in the middle of the Coral Sea.
By morning the castaways are crowded onto a sandbank barely above water. They save the water, the provisions, the chronometers. The Bridgewater, sailing in company, draws away without coming to their aid. Nothing is left but to attempt the impossible: an open boat, fourteen men, hundreds of miles of sea to Sydney.
Governor King keeps his word and fits out relief ships. Flinders returns for his men, then sets out again for England aboard the Cumberland, a tiny schooner. Torres Strait, the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Wessel Islands, Timor: the hull leaks more and more, and the Indian Ocean is still to be crossed.
For want of anything better, he puts in at Île de France. He does not know that war has broken out again between France and England. At Port-Louis, General Decaen receives him as an impostor, seizes his charts and journals, and has him shut up in a tavern.
The scholar becomes a prisoner. How long will the war hold the man who charted Australia?
Product details
- Publisher
- Itinerarium Éditions
- Series
- Oceania & Pacific
- The author
- Matthew Flinders
- Date of the journey
- 1803-1804
- Modern edition by
- Isabelle Perol
- Language
- English
- Format
- Paperback, 6 × 9 in (15.2 × 22.9 cm)
- Pages
- about 190
The author
Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders was born on 16 March 1774 at Donington, in Lincolnshire, the son of a surgeon. He entered the Royal Navy in 1789 and served under Bligh aboard the Providence, then went to New South Wales in 1795, where he explored the coast with George Bass and proved in 1798 that Van Diemen's Land is an island. Commander of the Investigator in 1801, he sailed round Australia; then, after the wreck of the Porpoise in 1803, he was held on Île de France by General Decaen until 1810. He published A Voyage to Terra Australis in London in July 1814, and died on 19 July 1814, the day after its publication, at the age of forty.
All books by Matthew Flinders →The journey mapped
In the Same Place, Through the Centuries
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Phillip Parker King, Relation d'une reconnaissance des côtes intertropicales et occidentales de l'Australie (1818-1822)
Son of Governor Philip Gidley King, the very man who fits out the relief ships for the castaways of the reef, Phillip Parker King takes up Flinders's work where captivity had interrupted it.
Read a free edition → -
Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1831-1836)
On the Beagle's return voyage, in 1836, the young Darwin calls at Sydney and, a few months later, at Port-Louis: the two poles of Flinders's book.
Read a free edition → -
Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zélée (1837-1840)
After the Antarctic and the Pacific islands, Dumont d'Urville steers his two corvettes into Torres Strait in 1840, which Flinders had crossed in his schooner thirty-seven years earlier.
Our edition → -
Joseph Beete Jukes, Relation du voyage hydrographique du HMS Fly (1842-1846)
A geologist aboard HMS Fly, Jukes spends four years with the team surveying the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait, with a rigour that at last makes safe the route Flinders had opened at the price of so many anxious nights.
Read a free edition →
The modern editor
More in this series
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