84 HEREDITY AND DEVELOPMENT OF NAVAL OFFICERS. 



of his names serve to-day. He was the first white man to enter Spencer's Gulf 

 and Gulf of St. Vincent, on which Adelaide now stands. He reached Port Jack- 

 son, May 8, 1802, pushed on and completed the circumnavigation of the continent 

 in June 1803, the trip having been hastened because of the rottenness of the planks 

 of his ship. Flinders now determined to go to England to carry his report to the 

 admiralty and secure a better vessel in which to continue his explorations. On 

 the return voyage he was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, but practically all 

 of the company were landed on a sandy island. Flinders and an assistant rowed 

 in an eight-oar cutter with 12 sailors back to Port Sydney, 700 miles. He returned 

 with three vessels, by which the party was sent, some to Sydney, some to Canton, 

 and a few with himself to England, via Torres Strait and Cape of Good Hope. 

 In his 29-ton schooner Flinders was forced to stop at Mauritius, where the governor 

 detained him from December 1803 to June 1810. Upon his return to England he 

 set himself to prepare his charts and his book, "A Voyage to Terra Australis." 

 As the book was passing through the press, Flinders died, at the age of 39, of some 

 "constitutional internal trouble" which had caused him pain at Mauritius. 



Flinders was a nomad with intellectual curiosity. He had a love of dis- 

 covery. "As a child, he was one day lost for hours. He was ultimately found in 

 the middle of one of the sea marshes, his pockets stuffed with pebbles, tracing 

 the rivulets of water, so that by following them up he might find out whence 

 they came." Asked in later life for juvenile anecdotes illustrative of personal 

 character, he replied, that he was "induced to go to sea against the wishes of friends 

 from reading Robinson Crusoe." But the book merely afforded the stimulus to 

 which the mind and temperament of the reader determined the reaction. "The 

 call of the sea was strong within him." The trip to Tahiti stimulated his "passion 

 for exploring new countries," as Flinders says. 



Whence this trait came is not clear from the biography; the father was a surgeon 

 and so was the father's father. However, the father's brother, John, was in the 

 navy, but did not altogether like it and was not successful in it. We naturally 

 look for this nomadism among the male relatives of the mother, but about them 

 we have no data. We know only that the mother's name was "Susannah Ward 

 (1752-1783)." 



The younger brother, Samuel Ward Flinders, desired to accompany his 

 brother to Australia on two trips and became a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. 

 Most interesting is the fact that Flinders's daughter Anne, who married a William 

 Petrie, had a son, William Matthews Flinders Petrie, bom 1863, who is the leading 

 British Egyptologist, professor of Egyptology in the University College, London - 

 as great a discoverer in his field as his mother's father was in another. 



Flinders was a visualist. This shows itself in his neat, beautiful hand- 

 handwriting, in his careful, neat maps, in the appeal made upon him by organic 

 as well as topographic forms. Indeed, it was largely the desire to see new things 

 that lay at the basis of his love of discovery. Perhaps, as is often the case, his 

 paternal ancestors were surgeons because of an appeal of form. 



Flinders was intrepid. He started out in a 8-foot boat to explore the rugged 

 shores of Australia. He pushed on around Australia in a sloop whose unseaworthi- 

 ness was demonstrated shortly after the start on the voyage. He crossed the 

 Indian Ocean in a schooner of 29 tons that leaked almost to the capacity of the 

 pumps working night and day. He rowed in an open cutter 700 miles from Wreck 

 Reef to Sydney along the coast of Australia. 



