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Today a statue of Lincolnshire lad Matthew Flinders is due to be unveiled at Australia House in London. You may never have heard the name, but Aussies know all about him. There are plenty of statues down under, not to mention Flinders University, Flinders Bay and Flinders Way.
He died 200 years ago on Saturday and was buried at St James, Hampstead Road, which was demolished in the 1950s. It is thought that his grave might lie under Platform 15 in Euston Station, and it is in Euston that the statue is due to be placed. A fine work by sculptor Mark Richards, it shows a man in early 19th century dress, half kneeling over a chart, dividers in hand.
The chart, of course, shows Australia, for Flinders’s chief claim to fame is the circumnavigation and charting of the southern continent, Terra Australis, and he is credited with popularising the name Australia. This Royal Naval voyage, which was championed by Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, took place in 1801-03. Flinders had already impressed on earlier voyages, including that on which he and naval surgeon George Bass had demonstrated that Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) was an island.
For the precise observations required for accurate navigation and surveying, Flinders was, at the start, assisted by an astronomer, John Crosely, sent by the Board of Longitude with a selection of top-notch precision instruments. These included the well-travelled third timekeeper of Larcum Kendall, known as K3, which is currently on display with all of Kendall’s and John Harrison’s marine timekeepers in an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum on the quest for longitude.
Crosley, however, became ill and returned home, leaving Flinders with the instruments and as the chief observational expert. Flinders had learned his trade from voyaging with William Bligh, who had voyaged with James Cook and astronomers such as William Wales and Charles Green. He did an exemplary job in fixing positions, collecting data and ultimately drawing up wonderfully precise charts. As David Barrie writes on the Longitude Project Blog, “His real claim to fame rests on the outstanding quality of his hydrographic work.”
The production of charts and the return home were somewhat delayed by being shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef and then, once travelling on a ship that was not under agreed protection as a scientific expedition, being captured by the French, with whom Britain was then at war. Flinders was kept on Isle de France (Mauritius) from the end of 1803 and did not return to Britain until 1810. He was only 40 when he died four years later.
But I promised a cat. The cat was called Trim, born in 1799 on the Southern Indian Ocean and accompanied Flinders around Australia and to Mauritius. He was “the best and most illustrious of his Race, the most affectionate of friends, faithful of servants, and best of creatures.” Flinders, with time on his hands on Mauritius, but evidently also mourning the loss of this marvellous feline, wrote a biographical tribute. You can see the manuscript here.
I’ll leave it to you to find out what happened to poor Trim in 1804. I prefer to recall, with Flinders, his “little merriments” and “superior intelligence”. Trim, like Flinders, is well remembered and multiply memorialised in Australia: “Never will his like be seen again!”
I was interviewed last year for BBC London News about the plans for the statue and was asked why British people had generally not heard of Flinders. The only answer I could think of on the hoof was something along the lines of “we can’t remember everybody”. There is, though, some truth in this: Cook has become a sort of cipher for all British navigators of the age of sail, and many – Bligh, Vancouver, Phipps, Flinders – have become wrapped up in this cultural memory.
The specific recollection of Flinders is largely left to people in Australia, who see him as a founder of the nation, and possibly a less contentious one than Cook. He is known to many historians of science and naval and maritime Britain, of course, and also to many cat lovers. I think, too, that he has a trick of remaining in the minds of anyone who comes across his story and this statue may prompt people to do just that.
Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude is at the National Maritime Museum until 4 January 2015. You can read more about Flinders, navigation and charting in the accompanying book, Finding Longitude, by Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt.
For more on the book, exhibition or Flinders, find Rebekah Higgitt @beckyfh.
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