1810 (June 13) : Release of Flinders.

1810 (October 24) : Return to England.

1814 (July 19) : Death of Flinders.

***


THE LIFE OF MATTHEW FLINDERS.


CHAPTER 1. BIRTH AND ORIGINS.

Matthew Flinders was the third of the triad of great English sailors by
whom the principal part of Australia was revealed. A poet of our own
time, in a line of singular felicity, has described it as the "last
sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space; "* (* Bernard O'Dowd,
Dawnward, 1903.) and the piecemeal, partly mysterious, largely accidental
dragging from the depths of the unknown of a land so immense and
bountiful makes a romantic chapter in geographical history. All the great
seafaring peoples contributed something towards the result. The Dutch
especially evinced their enterprise in the pursuit of precise information
about the southern Terra Incognita, and the nineteenth century was well
within its second quarter before the name New Holland, which for over a
hundred years had borne testimony to their adventurous pioneering, gave
place in general and geographical literature to the more convenient and
euphonious designation suggested by Flinders himself, Australia.* (* Not
universally, however, even in official documents. In the Report of the