Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/334

 the labour was excessive; so much so that Flinders determined to fetch Mauritius in hopes of finding some more convenient way of getting home. According to his last news from home France and England were at peace; and even if not, he believed that the passport given him by the French government before he left England would meet the case. Unfortunately, as the instructions given him by Governor King, on leaving Port Jackson, did not clearly warrant his touching at Mauritius, he considered it prudent to state his reasons in the log; in doing which he laid little stress on the necessities of his case, but dwelt, with the ardour of a surveyor, on the opportunities that would be afforded him of obtaining information on many points of interest. He anchored on 15 Dec. in Baie du Cap, from which he was directed to go round to Port Louis and see the governor, M. Decaen. Decaen at once objected that the passport was for the Investigator, and had no mention of the Cumberland. Flinders was therefore detained, his men were made prisoners, and his books and papers taken for examination. The last entry in his log was sufficient to excite suspicion; and Flinders, burning with anxiety to get to England and renew his survey, appears, even from his own account, to have acted with want of temper and tact. The governor was omnipotent; his personal ill-will put the worst construction on Flinders's unlucky explanations; he declared that the man was there as a spy, attempting to take a base advantage of the passport which had been granted to aid a scientific voyage. Flinders was accordingly kept in close confinement; and though, after nearly two years, he was allowed to reside in the country with leave to go about within two leagues of the house, his imprisonment was continued for nearly seven years. All exchanges were refused; instructions for his release were sent out from France, but Decaen chose to consider them optional, or not sufficiently explicit, and still detained him; nor did he release him till 7 June 1810, when he gave him permission to return to England, by Bombay, on parole not to serve against France during the course of the war. Accordingly, on 9 June, Flinders left Mauritius in a cartel for Bombay, but meeting with a man-of-war sloop bound to the Cape, he took passage in her to that place, where be found a ship going to England, he arrived at Portsmouth on 24 Oct. 1810. As soon as his release was known in England, he had been promoted to post rank, with seniority dated back as far as the patent of the existing board of admiralty would allow, 7 May 1810. It was admitted that had he come home in the Cumberland or at that time, he would have been then, in 1804, promoted; but it was impossible to date the commission back without an order from the king in council, which would involve more trouble than the admiralty were willing to undertake.

A few months after his return he was desired to prepare a narrative of his voyage, to which task he steadily devoted himself for the next three years. The sedentary employment aggravated the symptoms of a disease due probably, in its origin, to the hardships to which he had been exposed, and which had become more developed during the term of his long imprisonment. He lived to complete his work, and died, 19 July 1814, shortly before it was published. He had married in April 1801, while fitting out the Investigator, and at his death left one daughter, a child two years old.

Flinders appears to have had an extraordinary natural gift as a surveyor, so that with little or no instruction he became one of the best of the hydrographers who have graced our naval service. His survey of a large proportion of the Australian coast, though carried out under great disadvantages, has stood the test of time, and forms the basis of our modern charts. He was also one of the first, if not actually the first, to investigate the error of the compass due to the attraction of the iron in the ship, and contributed a paper on the subject to the Royal Society, written while detained in Mauritius (Phil. Trans. 1805, p. 187).

[The principal authority for Flinders's professional life and for the history of his work is his own narrative: A Voyage to Terra Australia undertaken for the purpose of completing the discovery of that vast country, and prosecuted in the years 1801-2-3. in his Majesty's ship the Investigator. and subsequently in the armed vessel Porpoise and Cumberland schooner, with an account of the shipwreck of the Porpoise, arrival of the Cumberland at Mauritius, and imprisonment of the commander during six years and a half in that island (2 vols. 4to, with atlas fo. 1814); see also Observations on the Coasts of Van Diemen's Land, on Bass's Straits, its Islands, and on parts of the Coasts of New South Wales (4to, 1801). The memoir in the Naval Chronicle, xxxii. 177 (with a portrait), is based on information supplied by Flinders himself; it is in this (p. 182 n.) that the suggestion was first made to give the name of Australia or Australasia to 'the tract of land hitherto most unscientifically called "New Holland,"' and which Flinders wrote of as Terra Australis. His correspondence with Sir and many letters from  (1773–1858) [q. v.], the botanist of the Investigator, are in Addit,