Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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François Le Vaillant, Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique par le cap de Bonne-Espérance (1781-1784)
Ten years after Bernardin's visit, a young ornithologist born in Dutch Guiana lands at the Cape, sent by a treasurer of the Dutch East India Company. Le Vaillant does not stop at Table Mountain: he sets off by wagon east of the Cape, then crosses the Orange River toward the land of the Namaquas, and returns in 1784 with more than two thousand bird skins and a giraffe skin. His account of 1790 was an immense success and was immediately translated everywhere, despite the errors and inventions that naturalists would charge him with. In it we find again the Khoikhoi and the Dutch colonists whom Bernardin had observed from the town.
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James Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784)
In December 1776, bound for the North Pacific, James Cook anchors the Resolution and the Discovery in a bay of the Kerguelen lands, which he names Christmas Harbour. His men find there the message left by the French in 1774, proof of the taking of possession. Cook surveys the coast, describes the low vegetation, the seals and the penguins, and suggests a name that will stick: the Island of Desolation. His account, published after his death, confirms the Breton's discovery just as the latter, condemned by the court martial, writes his defence in the château of Saumur.
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François Péron, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes (1800-1804)
Just as Flinders follows the south coast, Nicolas Baudin's French expedition explores the same shores from the east. On 8 April 1802, the Géographe meets the Investigator in a bay that Flinders names Encounter Bay. The naturalist François Péron wrote the official account, whose first volume appeared in 1807 and which Louis de Freycinet completed after his death. The French charts name part of the coast that Flinders had just surveyed Terre Napoléon, fuelling a long dispute over priority. The Géographe in turn puts in at King George Sound in early 1803.
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François Péron et Louis de Freycinet, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes (1800-1804)
This is the account from the other side: that of Nicolas Baudin's expedition, which Flinders meets on 8 April 1802 at Encounter Bay. The naturalist François Péron tells of the voyage of the Géographe and the Naturaliste along the same coasts, then of the stopover at Port Jackson where the two crews meet again. But the first volume, published in 1807, renames Flinders's discoveries: the south coast becomes Terre Napoléon, Kangaroo Island becomes Île Decrès. Flinders, then a prisoner on Mauritius, would protest in his own book. To read the Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes alongside his is to see the same coast through rival eyes.
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Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, Voyage dans les quatre principales îles des mers d'Afrique (1801-1802)
Botanist of the Baudin expedition, Bory quarrels with his captain and leaves the ship at the Isle de France. He then passes to Bourbon, where in October 1801 he climbs the Piton de la Fournaise and gives the first general scientific description of the volcano, one of whose craters now bears his name. His three volumes of 1804, accompanied by an atlas, cover Tenerife, the Isle de France, Bourbon and Saint Helena. Thirty years after Bernardin, it is the same string of islands seen by a professional naturalist, who measures their relief and classifies their plants where his predecessor doubted his own competence and trusted his eye.
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Phillip Parker King, Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia (1818-1822)
Sixteen years after Flinders, Lieutenant Phillip Parker King, son of a former governor of New South Wales, is charged with completing the survey of the coasts that the Investigator, too dilapidated, had had to leave unfinished. With the small cutter Mermaid and the botanist Allan Cunningham, he anchors at King George Sound in January 1818. There he searches in vain for the bottle Flinders had left with an account of his visit, not to take it away but to add a few lines, and finds, chart in hand, that his predecessor's surveys are accurate. His narrative, published in 1827, goes on to the tropical coasts of the north and west, but keeps Flinders as a constant model.
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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. Between 1817 and 1822, aboard the little cutter Mermaid and then the Bathurst, he surveys the northern and western coasts that the Investigator, too rotten, had been unable to finish, and passes through Torres Strait in his turn. His Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia, published in 1827, often cites his predecessor and corrects his charts with respect. The same reefs, the same treacherous tides and the same hydrographer's patience are all there.
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Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage de la corvette l'Astrolabe (1826-1829)
In October 1826, two days after sighting Cape Leeuwin, Jules Dumont d'Urville's Astrolabe drops anchor at King George Sound, which the French call Port du Roi-Georges. The stay lasts eighteen days. The sailors form friendly relations with the local people, whom the draughtsman Louis de Sainson depicts in several plates of the atlas. D'Urville judges the place suitable for a colony and is surprised that the British have not yet settled there; a few weeks later, a small garrison sent from Sydney founds the post that will become Albany. The official account, published from 1830, offers a French view of the shores described by Flinders.
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Charles Sturt, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia (1828-1831)
Flinders had followed the shore of Encounter Bay without seeing any great river come out there. Twenty-eight years later, Charles Sturt arrives at the same spot from the interior. Setting out from Sydney, he goes down the Murrumbidgee and then the Murray in a whaleboat as far as Lake Alexandrina, a short distance from the coast the Investigator had surveyed. The silted-up mouth lets no boat through: he must row all the way back up the river, exhausted and short of food. His narrative, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, published in 1833, opens the way to the founding of South Australia, on the very shores of Gulf St Vincent discovered by Flinders.
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Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836)
At the end of April 1836, on the voyage home, the Beagle anchors off Mauritius, by then British. Darwin finds Port Louis entirely French despite more than twenty-five years of British rule, with its shops and its little theatre. He observes the convicts transported from India who work on the roads, rides the island's only elephant and goes to see, at the Black River, coral reefs raised above the sea. The Beagle then calls at the Cape, Saint Helena and Ascension: exactly Bernardin's return route, sixty-five years later, followed by a naturalist who in his turn questions the age of the land.
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Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1831-1836)
On 6 March 1836, Captain FitzRoy's Beagle enters King George Sound for a stay of eight days, the last in Australia. The young Charles Darwin sees only a sandy, monotonous countryside, but he accompanies FitzRoy to Bald Head, where earlier navigators had thought they recognized corals or petrified trees; there he identifies limestone concretions formed around roots buried in the sand. One evening, he attends a great dance bringing together the people of the Sound and a group from the interior. His journal, published in 1839, thus combines a learned dialogue with his predecessors and a gaze often harsh toward the peoples he met.
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Thomas Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1831-1836)
Surveyor General of New South Wales, Thomas Mitchell sets out from Sydney, where Flinders had refitted his ship, but heads inland. On his third expedition, in 1836, he crosses the plains of present-day Victoria, which he names Australia Felix, and reaches Portland Bay, on the coast that Flinders had followed between Cape Northumberland and Cape Otway. There he finds, to his astonishment, settlers already established. From the top of Mount Macedon he sees Port Phillip, the bay the Investigator had explored. His Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, published in 1838, hastened the colonisation of these lands.
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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. On 1 June the Astrolabe and the Zélée run aground on the reefs and stay trapped for several days, beaten by the tide, before working free. The narrative, published from 1841, shows that the passage had lost none of its reputation. It also offers a peaceful revenge to the book's history: French sailors in the footsteps of an Englishman whom France had detained, citing his charts as a reference no one now disputes. Its title is Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie.
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John Lort Stokes, Discoveries in Australia (1837-1843)
An officer of the Beagle, already aboard during Darwin's voyage, John Lort Stokes returned to Australia in the same ship to complete the chart of the coasts. In 1841 he reached the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria, anchored in Investigator Road at Sweers Island and found there traces of Flinders's visit. He then ascended two rivers, which he named the Flinders and the Albert, and called the grassy plains he found the Plains of Promise, a hope of pasture for settlers. His illustrated Discoveries in Australia reads as a second visit to the shores that close this volume, forty years later, with the eye already of a colony in search of land.
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Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia and Overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound (1840-1841)
In 1841, Edward John Eyre accomplishes on foot what Flinders had done by sea: linking Fowler's Bay to King George Sound along the cliffs of the Great Bight. Five months of walking, almost without water, with his overseer John Baxter and three Aboriginal companions, at the edge of a plain not yet called the Nullarbor. Baxter is killed on the way; Eyre and the young Wylie, a native of King George Sound, survive only through the unexpected meeting with a French whaler, the Mississippi, anchored near the Recherche Archipelago. The journal, published in 1845, offers the exact overland counterpart of this first volume.
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Joseph Beete Jukes, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly (1842-1846)
Naturalist and geologist of the Fly, Joseph Beete Jukes spent four years surveying the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait, which Flinders had crossed feeling his way. In 1844, the expedition raised a stone beacon on Raine Island, at the outer edge of the reef, to show ships a safe opening. In his Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly, Jukes describes at length the reefs seen from within and without, and takes up the question of how coral islands form, which Flinders had raised at Half-way Island. He also meets the strait islanders, notably at Darnley, and leaves vivid portraits of them, which extend this volume's pages on the Murray Islands.
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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. He describes the growth of the reefs, the life of the strait's islanders, the canoes and the turtle markets, and the building of a beacon on Raine Island to guide ships to the passage. His Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly, published in 1847, shows the Coral Sea turned into a trade route: the dangers Flinders reported are now charted, buoyed and almost tamed.
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Ludwig Leichhardt, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia (1844-1845)
In October 1844, the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt left the Darling Downs, west of Moreton Bay, to reach Port Essington, on the north coast, overland. He arrived more than fourteen months later, having lost the naturalist John Gilbert, killed in a night attack. His route skirts the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria, which Flinders had surveyed from the sea: where the Investigator saw only a low coast fringed with shoals, Leichhardt discovers rivers, plains and the peoples who live there. His Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia lets us read the end of this volume in reverse, from the interior toward the shore.
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John MacGillivray, Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake (1846-1850)
Naturalist of the Rattlesnake, commanded by Owen Stanley, John MacGillivray followed from 1846 to 1850 the survey of the inner route of Queensland, of Torres Strait and of the south coast of New Guinea; the young Thomas Henry Huxley was aboard as assistant surgeon. At Cape York, in 1849, the crew took in Barbara Thompson, a young Scottish castaway who had lived nearly five years among the islanders of Prince of Wales Island. MacGillivray recorded her testimony in his Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, valuable on the languages and customs of the strait. Here we find again the islands and anchorages that Flinders had named, now visited by ships.
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James Clark Ross, A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions (1847)
On 12 May 1840, James Clark Ross's Erebus and Terror drop anchor at Christmas Harbour for a campaign of magnetic observations. The expedition stays about two and a half months, in almost continuous gales. The young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker gathers there the Kerguelen cabbage, Pringlea antiscorbutica, whose name tells its virtues against scurvy, the sickness that had broken the crews of 1774. Ross does not dwell on regrets: his volumes go on to tell of the push toward the great ice barrier that will bear his name. The southern stopover nonetheless fills precious pages on Kerguelen's land, its rocks, its plants and its storms.
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Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1854-1862)
For eight years the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace travels the islands of the Malay world in search of birds and insects. He stays at Macassar, the port from which Pobassoo's praus sailed, and passes through Timor, where Flinders had found a haven for his sick. During these travels he conceives, at the same time as Darwin, the theory of natural selection, and draws the boundary between the faunas of Asia and Australia. His book, published in 1869, lights up the whole Asian background of this volume: the merchants, the ports and the islands that already looked toward the Australian shores.
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Ida Pfeiffer, Voyage à Madagascar (1856-1858)
The Viennese traveller, who has already gone twice around the world, passes through Mauritius before reaching Madagascar in 1857. She describes Port Louis, the Creole and Indian servants, the grand dinners, the country houses, the cane plantations, the workers brought from India, the botanical garden and the waterfalls. Then Madagascar holds her in a conspiracy against Queen Ranavalona, from which she emerges expelled and ill. Back in Mauritius, she tends a fever of which she will die in Vienna. Half a century after Flinders, the same Creole hospitality, seen this time by a woman travelling alone.
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Nicolas Pike, Sub-Tropical Rambles in the Land of the Aphanapteryx (1867-1873)
United States consul at Port Louis from 1867 to 1873, Nicolas Pike devotes his leisure to the natural history of Mauritius and the neighbouring islands. He paints fish, gathers specimens that will end up at Harvard and in the Mauritius herbarium, and travels the island's uplands on foot. His book, published in New York in 1873, carries in its title the name of an extinct bird, the red rail, companion of the dodo. The reader of Flinders finds there the rivers, forests and gorges that the prisoner explored around Vacoas, described by another foreigner settled on the island for a few years.
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Henry Nottidge Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on the Challenger (1879)
A century after Kerguelen's second voyage, in January 1874, the British corvette Challenger puts in at the archipelago during the round-the-world cruise that founds modern oceanography. The naturalist Henry Nottidge Moseley walks its bays and observes the penguins, the elephant seals, the mosses and the famous cabbage, the fresh food Kerguelen's crews had so sorely lacked. His notes, written for a wide public, have the freshness of a field notebook. They show, up close and on foot, a land Kerguelen had only glimpsed in the fog, which in a hundred years had become a field of study for scientists and a hunting ground for sailors.
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Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1895-1896)
Nearly a century after Flinders, Mark Twain lands in Sydney for a lecture tour. Port Jackson, where the Investigator took on convicts, has become a great city; Port Phillip, the bay barely explored in 1802, shelters Melbourne and its horse races; Adelaide spreads near Gulf St Vincent. Twain is amused by everything, from trains that change gauge to colonial borders and wildlife, but he also listens to the history of the Aboriginal people and judges it severely. His book Following the Equator, published in 1897, shows what the shores Flinders named one by one have become within a few decades.
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Mark Twain, Le Tour du monde (Following the Equator) (1895-1896)
Ruined, Mark Twain sets out in 1895 on a lecture tour around the world. He discovers Sydney, its quays and magnificent harbour, crosses Australia with astonishment mixed with irony, then reaches India and calls at Mauritius. At Port-Louis he pokes fun at the heat and at the islanders' devotion to Paul and Virginia, and reports with mischief that, to hear them tell it, Mauritius was made first and paradise copied from it. Published in 1897, Following the Equator turns into cruise destinations the places where Flinders had known hunger and prison, and reminds us that travel can also be told with laughter.
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Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines (1912-1935)
In the early twentieth century, the Irishwoman Daisy Bates settles alone in a tent on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain: at Eucla in 1912, then near Yalata, not far from Fowler's Bay, and finally at Ooldea, where she spends sixteen years beside the transcontinental railway. There she gathers vocabularies, genealogies and stories of the peoples of the south coast, the descendants of those whom Flinders had only glimpsed from the sea. Published in 1938, her book is both a precious and a disturbing testimony: its very title expresses the conviction, now rejected, that these peoples were bound to disappear.
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Raymond Rallier du Baty, 15,000 Miles in a Ketch (1917)
In September 1907, two Breton brothers, Raymond and Henri Rallier du Baty, leave Boulogne aboard the J.-B. Charcot, a 48-ton fishing ketch, with four companions. Their aim: to map the Kerguelen Islands, which France has scarcely explored. To pay for the adventure, they hunt elephant seals and sell the oil. Their account, published in English before appearing in French as Aventures aux Kerguelen, has the humour and daring of expeditions without a budget. Raymond will return in 1913; his surveys will serve for the first complete map of the archipelago, published in 1922, a hundred and fifty years after his countryman's discovery.
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J. M. G. Le Clézio, Voyage à Rodrigues (1986)
Le Clézio, from a family settled in Mauritius since the eighteenth century, follows in the footsteps of his grandfather Léon, a ruined man who spent years searching on Rodrigues, the small island dependent on Mauritius, for the treasure attributed to the pirates of Anse aux Anglais. The account, published a year after the novel Le Chercheur d'or, blends the forebear's notebooks, sun-scorched ravines and the writer's reverie. One finds there, two centuries on, what Flinders felt on the Plaines Wilhems: an island that holds men fast, and a waiting that ends up becoming a way of life.
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Jean-Paul Kauffmann, L'Arche des Kerguelen (1993)
A few years after his release, the journalist and writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a hostage in Lebanon from 1985 to 1988, sets out for the Kerguelen Islands in the footsteps of Yves de Kerguelen, Rallier du Baty and the other discoverers. He shares the life of the scientists and soldiers at the base, sinks into the peat, gets lost, endures the wind that never stops. He dreams of sighting the rock arch that gives the book its title, and bad weather prevents him. The account of a goal missed, like that of 1774, his book turns southern isolation into literary material, never losing sight of the Breton navigator who revealed it.