Matthew Flinder's Great Voyage
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Matthew Flinder's Great Voyage G.S. Ritchie, United Kingdom The vessel selected for a great voyage of Australian discovery was Xenophon, an English north country built ship such as Captain Cook would have chosen. She was fitted out for the voyage at Sheerness, renamed Investigator and a crew of volunteers raised for her. Fowler, the First Lieutenant of Xenophon, continued these duties in the newly named ship, Flinders’ younger brother Samuel was appointed as Second Lieutenant and John Franklin served as one of the midshipmen; all including the Captain, hailed from Lincolnshire on the east coast of England. The civilians onboard included Crosley, the astronomer, whose return to England from the Cape of Good Hope due to illness was to throw a considerable burden of celestial obser vations on the Captain and his brother. William Westall, a student at the Royal Academy School in London, was the official landscape painter; Ferdinand Bauer, a German botanical painter, was sent onboard by Sir Joseph Banks, who also selected a naturalist, Robert Brown, a graduate of Marischal college, Aberdeen, with an assistant Peter Good, who brought onboard a portable greenhouse to pre serve the plant collection. John Allen, a miner, would collect the geological sam ples. Just before sailing from Portsmouth in 1801 Flinders met John Thistle, a seaman who had accompanied George Bass to Westernport in HMS Reliance and Flinders for the circumnavigation of Van Diemens Land in Norfolk where he had proved himself an excellent man. Although Thistle had only been home for three weeks after six years abroad he willingly accepted the post of Master of Investigator. Flinders had modelled himself on Cook in more ways than in surveying. As he sailed towards the Cape of Good Hope Flinders wrote in his journal: ‘At this time we had not a single person in the sick list, both officers and men being fully in good health, as when we sailed from Spithead. I had begun very early to put into execution the beneficial plan, first practised and made known by the great Captain Cook. It was in the standing orders of the ship, that on every fine day the deck below and the cockpits should be cleared, washed, aired with stoves, and sprin kled with vinegar. On wet and dull days they were cleaned and aired, without wash ing. Care was taken to prevent the people from sleeping upon deck, or lying down in their wet clothes; and once in every fortnight or three weeks as circumstances permitted, their beds, and the contents of their chests and bags, were opened out and exposed to the sun and air. On Sunday and Thursday mornings, the ship's company was mustered, and every man appeared clean shaved; and when the evenings were fine, the drum and fife announced the forecastle to be the scene Matthew Flinders (by Helena G. de Courcy 1814, after unknown artist) of dancing; nor did I discourage other playful amusements which might occasionally be more to the taste of the sailor, and were not unreasonable. ' For nearly 200 years ships bound for the East Indies, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope ran along the latitude of 409 South before fair westerly winds until their longitude was deemed sufficiently great for them to turn northwards for Sumatra or Java. Hence in the days before timekeepers it was not unlikely that the vessels, mostly Dutch, carried on too far to the east and thus on their way northward sighted the barren western shores of the continent. In 1627 The Dutch Guide Zeepaard, carrying a wealthy merchant Pieter Nuyts, overran the longitude more than was usual and explored a thousand miles of the southern coast before turning back. Throughout the seventeenth century vessels of the Dutch East India Company were constantly probing eastwards from Timor along the south coast of New Guinea and circling southwards around the Gulf of Carpentaria. But the Dutch kept their secrets and in England it was yet by no means certain whether Carpentaria was a gulf or a wide strait dividing New Holland from New South Wales, the whole eastern coastline of which Cook had laid down in his voyage in Endeavour 30-odd years before. There were major problems to solve, and details to be filled in, so that their Lordships' instructions to Flinders called for complete examination of the entire Australian coastline. It was a mammoth task. Using a holograph Memoir, compiled by Flinders whilst on the Isle de France, one is able to study his survey techniques. They consisted of running surveys, the name given to the method of laying down a coastline from a ship passing along offshore whilst keeping careful records of her position so that features along the shoreline, or inland mountains or hill peaks, could be fixed in relation to the ship’s track by cross bearings taken with the magnetic compass. The ‘rough charts’ were always plotted on the same day on which the land had been seen, the scale being 1 inch to 4 geographic miles. Whilst the ship lay in harbour or was sailing far offshore Flinders re-plotted the coastal surveys using his log-book, his latitude book, his longitude book and his compass bearing book, the observations in the last two being corrected according to the rates of chronometers and mag netic variation respectively found at the shore observation spots which formed the terminal points of each coastal traverse. These fair coastal sheets were plotted on a scale of 4 inches to a degree of longitude; but for harbour sheets, or in particular places requiring a larger scale, 12 inches to a degree of longitude was usually adopted. A number of symbols had been developed by the early navigators to indicate shoals, rocks, unsurveyed coastlines &c., but Flinders went further. ‘A first and principal deviation from former usage’, he writes in the Memoir, ‘is the distinction made between the night and the day track. It is obvious that a ship may pass near to rocks, reefs, or lone islands in the night without seeing them, and consequently without being able to lay them down in a chart, and as the generality of ships follow a former route with confi dence, this might occasion many disasters. During the day, then, when every neighbouring object above water was distinguishable and could be laid down, the Investigator’s track is represented by a small con tinued line, but to point out the uncertainty attending the track at night, a broken line is then used, not much unlike dotting; and the same is done in very thick weather, when objects could be no better seen than at night. ' Flinders then added a number of special symbols he used along the tracks some of the most important of which were as follows: • The position of the ship at noon, according to the latitude from an observation of the Sun. This was taken with a sextant (one Ramsden 8 in. and three Troughton 6 in. sextants were carried) and if the altitude of the Sun was more than 509 and less than 85s it was the constant practice to observe the altitude of the lower limb and the supplement of the upper limb at the same noon, with the same instrument and standing on the same place, and to take the mean of the results for the true latitude. The only corrections necessary to apply to such observations were parallax and refraction • Showed the position of the ship at noon according to dead reckoning when sights were unobtainable Chr. or TK. - the position of the ship for longitude by means of one or more timekeepers. If it occurs on the solid day track the observation is from altitudes of the Sun, but if on the dotted night track the altitudes of a fixed star were used. In order to show the prevailing winds at the time the ship passed along the various parts of the coast, a system of differently feathered arrows were used to indicate the forces and directions from light airs to hard gales. A somewhat similar system was used to show the directions and speeds of the currents encountered. ‘Az’ or 'Amp', signifying azimuth or amplitude observations of the Sun appear at intervals along the track, together with the variations as found and the ship’s head at the time, for Flinders had realised that iron within the vessel itself had an affect upon the compasses and in time he was able to reduce all these variations to what they would have been with the ship's head in the magnetic meridian and the effects of internal iron at a minimum. He used the anchor symbol to indicate where the ship had lain at anchor, but with true surveyor’s cau tion went on to say 'it must not be understood that these anchorages are always securely sheltered' Longitude posed a complex problem for those carrying out running surveys at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Flinders carried on board four chronometers, two by Earnshaw and two by Arnold, the rival clockmakers of London. Time in relation to Greenwich Mean Time could be carried by these timepieces, and converted to longitude by meridional observations of the Sun, but even the finest chronometer has a gaining or losing rate so that it was necessary to land the chronometers from time to time to make the necessary observations to find longitude and to ascertain their going rates. One can visualise the running survey as being composed of a series of traverses which had subsequent- Map of Flinders voyage in Australian waters (drawn by Juliet Fisher) ly to be corrected according to the results of the terminal observations.