The meeting has not gone well. The man who famously circumnavigated the great southern continent, Matthew Flinders, is back in London and has begun writing an account of his expedition. But there is some dispute over his preferred title, A Voyage to Australia.
Flinders has been using the word ‘Australia’, rather than New Holland’ or ‘Terra Australis’ in correspondence for some years now, and has high hopes of winning official approval for a name change. At this meeting with Sir Joseph Banks and representatives of maritime chart publisher Arrowsmith, however, his hopes have been dashed. Arrowsmith has been using ‘New Holland’ for many years and is not inclined to alter its charts, and Banks rejects ‘Australia’ for unspecified reasons. Perhaps he is resistant to change, or maybe he simply doesn’t like the sound of it. Whitehall and the admiralty are similarly dismissive of the proposal, and Flinders’ book will be published under the title A Voyage to Terra Australis.
In the introduction of his book, Flinders adds a footnote: ‘Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term, it would have been to convert it into Australia, as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the Earth.’1
In 1817, New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie will recommend that the name Australia be adopted, and in 1824 the British Admiralty will at last make it official. But Matthew Flinders will not live to see it.
While history will credit Flinders with the naming of Australia, it’s tempting to wonder if he ever happened upon a book by a Frenchman – a voyage of discovery to a land named Australia, written more than a century earlier.
A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, or The Southern World, published in France in 1676, with an English translation published in 1693, is the memoir of James Sadeur, a shipwrecked sailor who lived for 35 years among the ‘Australians’ before escaping to Madagascar then home to France. According to the preface of the book, ‘These memoirs were thought so curious that they were kept secret in the closet of a late great minister of state, and never published till now since his death.’2
After his ship founders, Sadeur, clinging to a plank, is washed ashore on the ‘continent de la Terre Australe’, which the English translation renders as ‘Australia’.3 Close to death, he is nursed back to health by the inhabitants, whom he calls ‘Australians’, and over the next 35 years learns their laws, customs and language, fights in their wars and encounters their strange animals – including predatory birds ‘of a monstrous strength and bigness’ able to pluck whales out of the water; claw-footed, pointy-headed horses; and ‘many other sorts of animals which don’t at all resemble any that we have in Europe’.4
The Australians, a cultivated, brave and deeply religious people who worship an invisible god, are generally about eight feet tall and slender, with long faces, large eyes and black hair, and go about naked. He doesn’t mention the colour of their skin, but tells us they are strong and vigorous, strictly vegetarian and never get ill.
Sadeur notes that all Australians are hermaphrodites – that is, they have both male and female genitalia. He does not describe how they procreate, but says that ‘if it happens that a child is born but of one [gender], they strangle him as a monster’.5
It never rains in Australia, ‘nor do they ever hear any thunder, and it is but very rarely that they see any fleeting clouds. There are neither flies, nor caterpillars, nor any other insect. There’s neither spider, nor serpent, nor any venomous beast to be seen,’ Sadeur says. ‘In a word, it is a land full of delights not to be met in any other part of the world, and is likewise exempt from the inconveniences that other places are troubled with.’6
It’s not a perfect utopia, however. ‘It is by a constant decree established in the world that we should possess no happiness without some pain, nor be able to keep it without some difficulty. And therefore it is no wonder the Australians are forced sometimes to maintain great wars to defend the country against invasion by foreign nations.
‘The most formidable of all those nations are the Fondins, a fierce and warlike people who are always ready to make an incursion among them in parts where they are least expected.’7
Sadeur tells us he fought bravely in two great battles against the Fondins before departing Australia for Madagascar, riding – Australian-style – on the back of a giant bird.
When A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis was first published, rollicking yarns of adventure in faraway places were very much in vogue. While such tales often gave the reading public cause to wonder how much was fact and how much fiction, they were nonetheless popular.
Sadeur’s tale proved singularly unpopular with the Paris clergy, however. Outraged by what they claimed were obscenities and ideas contrary to the Scriptures, the Church authorities summoned the book’s printer, who swore that the author, who delivered the manuscript to him, was not James Sadeur but a man named Gabriel de Foigny.
Foigny, from Lorraine, was a former Franciscan monk, kicked out of the order for drunkenness and debauchery. He converted to Protestantism, moved to Paris where he found work as a tutor, and had published a few small books. When questioned, Foigny admitted to having delivered the manuscript to the printer but claimed it had been given to him by James Sadeur.
No one believed him. Summoned to appear before a magistrate, Foigny confessed that he wrote the book to cash in on the voyage-of-discovery vogue, and that James Sadeur did not exist. His sentence, banishment from the city, was overturned when some of his tutorial pupils – who happened to be prominent citizens – interceded on his behalf. He lost their support soon afterwards, though, when he was prosecuted for impregnating one of his housemaids.
Gabriel de Foigny, the fornicating former monk and fabulist who perhaps inspired Jonathan Swift’s classic Gulliver’s Travels, and possibly gave Matthew Flinders a name to conjure with, took refuge in a monastery where he spent the rest of his days in quiet contemplation.
Matthew Flinders is only 39 but looks 70, says his wife Ann. A kidney infection that first flared up during his captivity on Mauritius has left him ‘worn to a skeleton’, she tells a friend.8
In these past weeks, confined to his bed at their rented house in Fitzroy Square, Ann has seldom left his side, and he has taken comfort in the kind regards of former comrades. Lieutenant Fitzwilliam Owen, who was imprisoned with him on Mauritius, has written to him from Madras, India, wishing him a speedy recovery. ‘You cannot doubt how much our society misses you,’ Owen writes. ‘We toasted you, Sir, like Englishmen. We sent the heartiest good wishes of your countrymen, aye, and women too, to Heaven for your success, in three times three loud and manly cheers, dictated by that sincerity which forms the glorious characteristic of our rough-spun English. Nay, Waugh got drunk for you, and the ladies did each take an extra glass to you.’9
Surprisingly, Flinders counts several former enemies among his best friends – Frenchmen who were his captors on Mauritius but grew to admire him. One such, Thomy Pitot, a Port Louis merchant, wrote to Louis de Bougainville, hoping the famed explorer could use his influence to secure Flinders’ release, and refuting General Decaen’s claim that Flinders was a spy. ‘Monsieur Flinders is not capable of such conduct,’ Pitot wrote. ‘His pure and noble character would never permit him to descend to the odious employment of a spy.’10
Bougainville did not secure Flinders’ freedom, if indeed he even tried, yet one of Flinders’ top priorities on his return to England was to successfully plead for the release of French prisoners of war taken in the capture of Isle de France.
One of his closest friends is Lieutenant Charles Baudin, who had served as a midshipman on Le Géographe under Captain Nicolas Baudin (no relation). Flinders had met Charles in 1802 when the Baudin expedition was in Port Jackson, and the two men struck up a friendship.
They met again on Isle de France in 1807, where Charles Baudin was then based, after he had been badly wounded in a naval battle with the British. Flinders helped care for the wounded Frenchman, whose right arm had to be amputated, and they had kept in touch thereafter. Baudin, whom Flinders encouraged to stay in the navy regardless of his injury, would eventually rise to the rank of admiral.
For some months now, the weight upon Ann Flinders’ shoulders has been considerable. Coping with Matthew’s deteriorating condition, and the distress of being able to do so little to ease his constant pain, has been made all the more difficult by financial constraints. The navy, quoting obscure regulations to cut Matthew’s pay, has been less than helpful. And the government, while happy to bask in reflected glory from his discoveries, shows no inclination to reward him for his service.
With money too tight to mention, the family has been forced to move six times in four years, and with her husband’s illness, along with the care of their two-year-old daughter, Anne, and the countless thankless tasks involved in running a household, Ann Flinders could be forgiven for complaining long and loud about her lot in life.
Yet she confides in a friend, ‘I am well persuaded that very few men know how to value the regard and tender attentions of a wife who loves them. Men in general cannot appreciate properly the delicate affection of a woman, and therefore they do not know how to return it. To make the married life as happy as this world will allow it to be, there are a thousand little amenities to be rendered on both sides, and as many little shades of comfort to be attended to.
‘Many things must be overlooked, for we are all such imperfect beings, and to bear and forbear is essential to domestic peace. You will say that I find it easy to talk on this subject, and that precept is harder than practice. I allow it, my dear friend, in the practical part I have only to return kind affection and attention for uniform tenderness and regard.
‘I have nothing unpleasant to call forth my forbearance. Day after day, month after month passes, and I neither experience an angry look nor a dissatisfied word. Our domestic life is an unvaried line of peace and comfort, and oh, may Heaven continue it such, so long as it shall permit us to dwell together on this Earth.’11
At the house in Fitzroy Square, on Monday 18 July 1814, the first copy of Matthew Flinders’ A Voyage to Terra Australis arrives from the publishers. Ann carefully places the two volumes on her husband’s bed so that his hand is touching them but, barely conscious now and fast slipping away, he will never see them.
The next day, with Ann, a family friend and an attending doctor at his bedside, Matthew Flinders dies. His last words, hardly audible but noted by the doctor, suggests that in his mind he was far away, an explorer once again, back with his comrades on the deck of the Investigator. ‘It grows late, boys,’ he whispered. ‘Let us dismiss.’12
Ann Flinders will live on in genteel poverty for another 40 years, ever mindful that her husband has been forgotten in his native land. Even his grave has been lost.