The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (6 page)

To achieve this he knew he would have to renavigate Cook’s Labyrinth, which he now understood a little better than its discoverer, thanks to later charts from two merchant captains, W. D. Campbell and William Swain. Each had, in 1797 and 1798 respectively, revealed the existence of stretches of coral reef far south of where Cook had first encountered them at Endeavour River. Making sense of how these reefs connected with those Cook had seen would be one more challenge in what Flinders privately intended to be a wholesale rectification and extension of his precursor’s famed navigation of the east coast of New South Wales.

Captain Matthew Flinders, RN, 1814
(National Library of Australia)

The young Lincolnshire-born sailor’s willingness to bare his soul to Ann came from a profound conviction that the best of modern men combined “the qualities first of the heart, and then of the head.” This belief made him heir to two of his century’s most influential cultural currents. The heart stood for the cult of “sensibility,” a pervasive fashion among middle-class English men and women that required the cultivation of intense and refined personal feelings. A man of sensibility was thought to possess a delicate and elastic nervous system capable of feeling and conveying sympathetic affinities with the emotions and sufferings of all sensate beings. Growing up in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, Flinders and Ann had absorbed the sensitivities of the bestsellers of the day, especially Laurence Sterne’s saga
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
(1759–67) and Ann Radcliffe’s gothic romance,
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794). Such works had helped shape young Matthew Flinders into a “man of feeling,” who, like his boyhood literary hero Robinson Crusoe, combined sensibility with a longing for romantic adventures and explorations.
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The head, on the other hand, stood for the rational values and technical attainments of the English Enlightenment that dominated Flinders’s chosen profession of naval surveyor. An ambition to excel in navigation and naval discovery had begun with boyhood readings of the great journals of James Cook, whose explorations had added half a hemisphere’s worth of new knowledge to geography, navigation, natural history, and ethnography. Trumping his European rivals, Cook had brought new lands and resources into the reach of the British Empire and quickened the march of reason throughout the Western world. In the process, he’d risen from plowman’s son to world celebrity.
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Gripped by a similar ambition, Matthew Flinders rejected his father’s modest occupation of rural surgeon-apothecary to join the British navy at the relatively late age of fifteen. The boy’s slight frame belied a fierce will. Advised to concentrate on the skills of navigation and hydrography, Flinders was by 1792 serving as a midshipman on William Bligh’s second voyage to the South Seas and the West Indies. Battle experience against the French two years after, followed by a naval posting in the colony of New South Wales, brought promotion and the chance to undertake explorations and surveys for Governor John Hunter.

By the time Flinders returned to England in September 1800, he’d gained enough self-belief to secure agreement from Sir Joseph Banks and the Admiralty for the circumnavigation and survey of New South Wales and New Holland. His orders were to focus in particular on a survey of the Torres Strait and other unknown parts, rather than areas already charted by Cook; to find out whether the east and west coasts belonged to a single continent or were separated by a body of water; and to explore “this, the only remaining considerable part of the globe.”
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*   *   *

Flinders was anguished to learn from Ann’s letters that she had endured a miscarriage, an eye operation, and a nervous collapse, and replying to her required all his considerable resources of sensibility and reason. “Oh my love, my love, how much do I sympathize in thy sufferings,” he wrote. So he should, for he was the source of most of her pain. Midway through the previous year, after bewildering Ann with letters that blew hot and cold in line with his career prospects, he’d suddenly rushed her into marriage. Having been promoted to commander, he hoped she’d be able to accompany him to New South Wales, but the Admiralty and Banks vetoed the idea. Rather than risk his new command, he immediately sent his bride of three months back to her parents and departed for New South Wales.

News of Ann’s subsequent breakdown was painful enough; worse was her accusation that it had resulted from his “poor proof of … affection.” In response he begged her to remember that they could never have lived comfortable, independent lives on his English pay. All his actions had been honest and heartfelt: “Heaven knows,” he pleaded, “with what sincerity and warmth of affection I have loved thee.” Instead, he argued, she ought to stop treating him as the perpetrator of a “crime,” accept what fate had dished up, and restore her health with thoughts of their happy future. “See me engaged successfully thus far, in the cause of science and followed by the good wishes and approbation of the world,” he enjoined. It was a prospect that he, at least, found supremely consoling.
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There was more than a dash of rhetorical calculation in this, and in his successive letters to Ann. Flinders liked to present himself as a suffering romantic, forced by poverty to chase fame and fortune in a remote wilderness that had parted him from his heart’s desire. The vast Pacific separating them became a barrier that could be blamed for their pain. “In torture at thy great distance from me,” he wrote, “I lay musing upon thee, while sighs of fervent love, compassion for thy suffering health, and admiration of thy excellencies in turn get utterance.” Such oscillations between emotional hyperbole and masculine rationality were typical. Often his two creeds of sensibility and science pulled him in opposite directions, making his actions appear conflicted and cold, but they could also sometimes work together, generating a combination of sensitivity and energy.
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No leg of his impending voyage, however, would test the compatibility of these two philosophies more than “threading the needle” through Cook’s fearsome Labyrinth and the treacherous Torres Strait.

*   *   *

The isolation and mental strain experienced by British survey captains while extending the empire was known to produce a grim toll of suicides, breakdowns, and heart attacks. Flinders understood the loneliness he would face in upholding a necessarily removed and authoritarian role as the voyage’s commander, so, like Captain Robert Fitzroy after him, who chose gentlemanly Charles Darwin to keep him company, Flinders selected a sympathetic companion from outside the naval service to provide an outlet for personal feelings. Given that Cook’s 1770 voyage had set a precedent for using Indigenous guides, Governor King, Hunter’s successor, was not surprised when asked by Flinders in May 1802 if he could enlist two “natives of the country” as supernumeraries. Flinders explained: “I had before experienced much advantage from the presence of a native of Port Jackson, in bringing about a friendly intercourse with the inhabitants of other parts of the coast.”
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He was referring in particular to the assistance rendered by a young Aboriginal who’d accompanied Flinders on two local explorations in 1798 and 1799. Bungaree, a “worthy and brave fellow,” had migrated to Sydney some years earlier from Broken Bay, near the mouth of the Hawkesbury River, and he helped Flinders calm several dangerous skirmishes, such that “[his] good disposition and open and manly conduct … attracted my esteem.” Flinders normally reserved such warm praise for personal friends like George Bass, the British explorer, but he’d come to regard his “native friend” Bungaree (whose name Flinders spelled “Bongaree”) in the same light.
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Flinders’s need to maintain the distance of command was all the more acute because his sulky younger brother Samuel, a junior officer on the
Investigator
, was inclined at every opportunity to take advantage of their fraternal relationship.

One outlet for the commander’s natural warmth was his famous fat black cat, Trim—named after the faithful manservant in Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
. That Trim was also besotted with Bungaree further cemented Flinders’s affection for his native companion: “If he [Trim] had occasion to drink, he mewed to Bongaree and leaped up to the water cask; if to eat, he called him down below and went straight to his kid [kit], where there was generally a remnant of black swan. In short, Bongaree was his great resource and his kindness was repaid with caresses.”
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Bungaree’s sensitivity was matched by his courage. On July 30, 1802, a week after departing Port Jackson, the
Investigator
and its supporting brig the
Lady Nelson
, captained by Lieutenant John Murray, arrived at Hervey Bay. This lay just off Great Sandy Isle (today’s Fraser Island), at the southernmost entrance of the Great Barrier Reef. The following day, Flinders and Bungaree strolled together along the beach toward Great Sandy Cape, while the remainder of the shore party—botanist Robert Brown, gardener Peter Good, mineralogist John Allen, and illustrators Ferdinand Bauer and William Westall—walked in the opposite direction to collect specimens. The captain and his companion were immediately confronted by a group of spear-carrying Aborigines, waving tree branches and gesturing angrily for the strangers to go back. Bungaree’s response set a pattern for the rest of the voyage. He stripped off his clothes, dropped his spear, and walked steadily toward the warriors, chanting words of peace in his own language.

Flinders’s susceptible heart melted at what followed: “finding they did not understand his language, the poor fellow, in the simplicity of his heart, addressed them in broken English, hoping to succeed better.” Though Bungaree’s words might have been opaque, his fearless and open demeanor did its work. The warriors allowed him to approach and accepted his proffered gifts with pleasure. Shrewdly, Flinders followed these overtures by hosting a feast of dugong.
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Boongaree
by Pavel Mikhaylov
(© 2013, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg)

Thanks to Bungaree, Flinders’s methods of establishing good relations with Aboriginal warriors always went beyond the formal proprieties suggested in his sailing orders. In stark contrast to Cook’s experience at Endeavour River, the goodwill instilled by Bungaree’s courage and dexterous displays of spear throwing, accompanied by prolific gifts of hatchets, woolen caps, and mirrors, usually gave rise to a spirit of reciprocation. At adjacent Keppel Bay, for example, the sailors met another band of initially hostile warriors, whom they similarly befriended.

A few days later, on August 15, two sailors strayed from the rest of their party at dusk, and with the sudden plunge of darkness became lost in a morass of muddy shoals and tangled mangroves. The following morning their worried shipmates spied a group of twenty-five Aborigines walking along the beach in the company of two ludicrously muddy figures, “with clothes all rags without shoes and stockings.” The warriors had rescued the two sailors, warmed them by a fire, fed them with broiled ducks, and led them at daybreak to the boat. Reflecting later on the character of the region’s Aborigines, Flinders was unequivocally positive: “Of their dispositions we had every reason to speak highly.”
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On their many excursions together, we may guess that Bungaree confided to Flinders something of his own customs, ideas, and practices. Flinders certainly showed an unusually keen understanding of the environmental skills and cultures of Aboriginal people. At Wide Bay, for example, noticing denser than usual Aboriginal populations, he “inferred … that the piece of water at the head of Wide Bay was extensive and shallow; for in such places the natives drew much subsistence from the fish which there abound and are more easily caught than in deep water.” Such population density also suggested the presence of ample fresh water. He further speculated that the fleshier, stronger appearance of these northern peoples was “a result of being able to obtain a better supply of food with the scoop nets, which are not known on the southern parts of the coast.”
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