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Abstract
This article explores varying forms of ‘remembering’ and history-making by captains on British state-sponsored voyages of discovery, focusing on the example of Captain Matthew Flinders. Flinders commanded HMS Investigator on an expedition that set sail in 1801 to chart the coastline of Australia. Scholarly attention places much emphasis on the performance and labour involved in such voyages of exploration, focusing on the spatially orientated challenges and results of charting and surveying. But the work of constructing and communicating an authoritative account was equally as important for an officer in the Royal Navy. These accounts were also crucial for the metropolitan institutions seeking to manage and assess the expeditions. Through the varied styles of writing produced by Matthew Flinders – most dating from his protracted period of imprisonment on Mauritius – we see how very different forms of ‘remembrance’ can be arranged and expressed in a number of ways. This article examines issues such as the idea of a captain's success; the extent to which a captain associated himself with, or distanced himself from, the scientific instruments on board; and the captain's relationship with the different institutions concerned with exploration. Considering these themes sheds new light on the history of exploration and its intrinsic relationship with the active processes of history-making.
Notes
Naval Chronicle, vol. 1, Jan.–June 1799, ii.
ibid., iii.
Naval Chronicle, vol. 32, July–Dec. 1814, v.
State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW), Matthew Flinders papers, Private letters, vol. 1, Matthew Flinders to Willingham Franklin, 1801.
See Cambridge University Library, Royal Greenwich Observatory MSS (CUL RGO), RGO 14/67 and RGO 14/68. See especially, Flinders ‘Memorial to his charts’, in RGO 14/68, but also note 14/64 and 14/66.
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Flinders papers (NMM FLI), FLI/01, Joseph Banks to Matthew Flinders, 30 Oct. 1810 and William Bligh to Matthew Flinders, 18 Dec. 1811.
Scott, Matthew Flinders, 281.
Thompson, Witness against the beast, 176.
Uglow, Lunar men, 134–5.
See Dening, Mr Bligh's bad language.
SLNSW, Matthew Flinders, Private letters, vol. 2, Matthew Flinders to Charles Baudin des Ardennes au Port, 25 July 1808.
NMM FLI/11, ‘Matthew Flinders's biographical tribute to his cat Trim 1809’, 1.
ibid., 2.
Scott, Matthew Flinders, 21–5.
Typical of his affectionate biography, Scott sets out the following anecdote of Flinders's time with the Pasleys, describing Flinders in the same way that William Golding's Edmund Talbot describes a young midshipman (‘The young fellow in question … was a midshipman – not one of your ancients, stuck in his inferior position like a goat in a bush, but an example of the breed that brings a tear to every maternal eye’, in Golding, Rites of passage [Norfolk, 1982], 33). Scott writes: ‘In the later part of his life he used to relate with merriment, how he went, was asked to dine, and then pressed to stay till next day under the captain's roof. He had brought no night attire with him, not having expected to sleep at the house. When he was shown into his bedroom, his needs had apparently been anticipated; for there, folded up neatly upon the pillow, was a sleeping garment ready for use. He appreciated the consideration; but having attired himself for bed, he found himself enveloped in a frothy abundance of frills and fal-lals, lace at the wrists, lace round the neck, with flutters of ribbon here and there. When, at the breakfast table in the morning, he related how he had been rigged, there was a shriek of laughter from the young ladies; the simple explanation being that one of them had vacated her room to accommodate the visitor, and had forgotten to remove her nightdress.’ ibid., 25–6.
Williams, Raymond. ‘Working-class culture’. University Left Review (Summer 1957), quoted in Smith, Raymond Williams, 439.
Dickinson, Educating the navy, 33–57.
For a discussion of the antagonistic relationship between natural philosophy, navigational practice and mathematics at the turn of the nineteenth century, see Rodger, Command of the ocean, 411; Heilbron, ‘A mathematician's mutiny’, 81–6; Schaffer, ‘Fish and ships’.
CUL RGO 4/185, Instructions for John Crosley to go on a voyage to New Holland (Australia) on board HMS Investigator on a scientific expedition, 7 Mar. 1801. See also CUL RGO 14/1.
Phillips, ‘Paying the astronomer’.
ibid., 18–19.
CUL RGO 14/68, Matthew Flinders to Nevil Maskelyene, HMS Investigator at Port Jackson, 25 May 1802, 17.
NMM FLI/11, ‘Matthew Flinders's biographical tribute to his cat Trim 1809’.
Quoted in Scott, Matthew Flinders, 289.
Dening, ‘Empowering imaginations’, 428.
Naval Chronicle, vol. 32, 178.
ibid., 190.