By Rob Harris
London: An original 200-year-old copy of Captain Matthew Flinders’ account of the first circumnavigation of Australia – complete with handwritten annotations and corrections – is expected to attract bids of more than six figures at a rare book auction in London next month.
The pre-publication first-edition copy of the pioneering navigator and cartographer’s work, A Voyage to Terra Australis, is among several items among his family’s collection – including a mahogany writing slope and books that Flinders took on his journey – to go under the hammer at auction house Christie’s on December 11.
Matthew Flinders was believed to be on the point of death when the first copies of Terra Australis came off the press.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
The British naval officer is best known as the commander of HMS Investigator, which he used to sail around Australia and map its coastline. At the time the continent was known as New Holland but, while he did not invent the name Australia, Flinders was credited it with popularising it.
The book of his discoveries cemented the name in the public imagination. He died from a long illness the day after it was published on July 19, 1814.
The traditional account is that the finished book was delivered to Flinders the day before he died, by which time he was already unconscious. However, recent biographies agree that he was aware of the finished product.
Thomas Venning, head of the books and manuscripts department at Christie’s London, said the pencil markings on the page were from an unidentified hand but from the content they were “clearly by someone very close to Flinders – perhaps someone who sailed with him, or someone who was closely involved in the production of the volume”.
Christies in London will auction a first edition of Matthew Flinders’ groundbreaking book A Voyage to Terra Australis, complete with pencil annotations and corrections across 39 pages in an unidentified early hand. Credit: CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2024
“Even though the received narrative is that Flinders was on the point of death when the first copies of Terra Australis came off the press, the authorial nature of the corrections raise the exciting possibility that the accepted story is wrong and that he was actually to read through the work and dictate corrections before he died,” Venning said.
Flinders sailed from England on July 18, 1801 and during the next two years he surveyed the entire south coast of Australia from Cape Leeuwin to Bass Strait, the east coast and the Gulf of Carpentaria. On the return journey, he was detained by the French in Mauritius for six-and-a-half years and was not released until June 1810. He devoted the remainder of his life to the publication of his work.
An introduction page of the first edition with pencil annotations.
A correction to page 36 changes the text from “At this time we had not a single person in the sick list” to “At the end of three months we had not a single person in the sick list”.
An annotation to page 160 provides a set of geographical co-ordinates, while another makes sweeping changes to a table of “native” vocabulary and others appear to provide thematic shoulder notes and instructions for moving whole passages elsewhere in the text. One annotation also appears to impose moral censure on a comment relating to relations between the sexes among Indigenous people.
Venning said in the absence of a second edition, it was impossible to know whether these amendments were regarded as the will of the author. The book, which is only the first volume, is expected to reach between £60,000 ($116,118) and £80,000.
“The pre-publication copy of Terra Australis is a complete one-off: no comparable volume is known,” he said.
Also up for sale and expected to reach up to £60,000, is Flinders’ own copy of Jacques Labillardiere’s Voyage in Search of La Perouse, which was almost certainly taken with him aboard the Investigator.
Pencil annotations, in Flinders’ own handwriting across nine pages, totalling 164 words and four corrections to co-ordinates, are principally concerned with Labilladiere’s descriptions of the geography of Australia. He is rather bluntly critical, claiming that “Labillardiere’s assertions are to be distrusted when they relate to geography”.
A writing slope belonging which accompanied Matthew Flinders on the Investigator used for entering log entries and writing correspondence, will also be auctioned.Credit: CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2024
The family is also selling Flinders’ copy of George Vancouver’s A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, in which he amends the author’s geographical co-ordinates, correcting the name of an island in modern-day French Polynesia and giving the name of the wife of the first Tahitian King.
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