486 



THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



With Bligh Matthew Flinders, like Banks, was a Lincolnshire man, 



Torref h as students of his maps have reason to know. He was 



Strait. induced, he says, "to go to sea against the wishes of his 



friends from reading Robinson Crusoe." A fortnight 



CAPTAIN MATTHEW FLINDERS, R.N. 

 (From an engraving, published soth Sept. 1814, by Joyce Gold, Naval Chronicle Offics.) 



before his death, in time of desperate illness and hard 

 poverty, he subscribed to a new edition of that work. 

 We note this clue to a character adventurous, patient, 

 determined. At the age of fifteen he was midshipman 

 on the Bellerophon, the famous ship on which, sixteen 

 years later, Napoleon surrendered. Two years later 

 he entered the school of Cook. He sailed under Bligh 



