Then Vancouver, Blyth, and the
French General and Admiral, D'Entre-Casteaux, who went in search of
the missing La Perouse. In 1826, Captain Dillon, an English navigator,
found the stranded remains of La Perouse's ships at two of the
Charlotte Islands group. We now come to another great English
navigator, Matthew Flinders, who was the first to circumnavigate
Australia; to him belongs the honour of having given to this great
island continent the name it now bears. In 1798, Flinders and Bass,
sailing in an open boat from Sydney, discovered that Australia and Van
Diemen's Land were separate; the dividing straits between were then
named after Bass. In 1802, during his second voyage in the
Investigator, a vessel about the size of a modern ship's launch,
Flinders had with him as a midshipman John Franklin, afterwards the
celebrated Arctic navigator. On his return to England, Flinders,
touching at the Isle of France, was made prisoner by the French
governor and detained for nearly seven years, during which time a
French navigator Nicolas Baudin, with whom came Perron and Lacepede
the naturalists, and whom Flinders had met at a part of the southern
coast which he called Encounter Bay in reference to that meeting,
claimed and reaped the honour and reward of a great portion of the
unfortunate prisoner's work.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25