How Matthew Flinders spent seven years in a tropical prison and came home a broken man

He’s one of the most celebrated figures in Australia’s story. But on this day in history – as a depressed, anxious jailbird – celebration was the last thing on Matthew Flinders’ mind.

In early November 1804, Matthew Flinders, a feisty and ambitious 30-year-old British naval officer, was battling depression and anxiety in a dilapidated prison on the French-controlled island of Mauritius off the east coast of Africa.

In his cramped cell he was finishing a letter to Joseph Banks, who three and a half decades before had joined James Cook’s exploration of the South Pacific on the ship Endeavour and who was now the most important man in British science as president of the venerable Royal Society.

In his letter, Flinders was including a chart of the huge continent he had just rigorously mapped, a land mass which the world knew as New Holland but which Flinders called “Australia”.

Hello darkness, my old friend … a minature portrait of Matthew Flinders from 1801, before his bleak spell in a French colonial prison.

A year earlier, Flinders had completed one of the great voyages in maritime history, steering his ship the Investigator around the whole coastline of “Australia” to prove it was one massive island continent.

Flinders and his crew had been joined on the voyage by his Indigenous guide Bungaree and his rescue cat Trim in an expedition that answered the mystery of New Holland, a land whose true extent had baffled the world powers since the Dutch began exploring it in the 1500s.

SHIPWRECK HERO: How Flinders saved his cat (and his men)

After completing the circumnavigation, Flinders had been rushing home to his wife in England when he was detained by French authorities in Mauritius – nowadays known as a tropical paradise – in December 1803.

France was then at war with Britain and Napoleon’s governor of Mauritius, General Charles Decaen, had a contempt for Englishmen in general and a loathing for arrogant ones such as Flinders.

War … it would be another 11 years before Britain’s war with France ended at the Battle of Waterloo, where French emperor Napoleon was decisivley defeated (but did not, contrary to the ABBA song, surrender). Flinders would spend seven of those years imprisoned.

Flinders was carrying a passport from the French government guaranteeing him free passage through the immunity of scientific study to benefit all of mankind.

But Decaen said he suspected Flinders was actually a spy and would hold him captive for the duration of the war.

The louder Flinders protested to a Frenchman he clearly despised, the more Decaen resolved to detain him.

So, Flinders and other British prisoners were confined in The Garden Prison, a big old shabby house. And Flinders was made to pay 11 Spanish dollars per month as rent – “perhaps the first instance,” he wrote wryly, “of men being charged for the accommodation of a prison.”

No fan of Flinders … feisty French General Charles Decaen, governor of Mauritius.

On November 4 1804, Flinders sent Banks his chart from the circumnavigation of New Holland and marked the top of it: “Australia”.

Flinders wanted to popularise the name, an abbreviation from Terra Australis, Latin for “southern land”.

The name had first been recorded on maps in the 15th century but only to mark a theory that there must be some unknown landmass far away that was supposed to “balance” the continents of the northern hemisphere.

Flinders was the first to chart the whole area of Australia and officially name it. He proved that it was one land and not several dissected by some inland waterways.

Home and away … a speculative map of Australia before its navigation by Flinders.

He told Banks in his letter that “the propriety of the name, Australia or Terra Australis, which I have applied to the whole body of what has generally been called New Holland, must be submitted to the approbation of the Admiralty and the learned in geography.”

“The whole body,” he said, “should have one general name, since it is now known … that it is certainly all one land”.

Flinders’ great voyage of discovery had proved that, but his hopes for receiving accolades on a triumphant return to England had been dashed by his arrest. He would eventually spend seven years as a prisoner of the French and would leave Mauritius a broken man.

Despite his predicament, Flinders’ ambition was still palpable when he wrote to Banks.

Paradise lost … Mauritius is a luxury getaway destination today. For Flinders, it was hell.

He told his mentor that he was determined to be free because he could not “rest in the unnoticed middle order of mankind”. He had not been born into a famous or wealthy family, he said, but his actions would ultimately “speak to the world”. Though he might never surpass Captain Cook in achievement, he told Banks, he could certainly “secure the second place”.

Flinders was born in 1774 and grew up in the village of Donington on Lincolnshire’s fens – marshlands in north-east England where grass rose out of the water and where the water stretched to the North Sea and across to the coast of Flanders, where his family had originated.

His father, Matthew Sr, described himself as a “surgeon, apothecary and man-midwife”.

He delivered babies and performed minor surgeries, though he had not graduated from a university. Young Matthew was not a hardy child and for a long time his health was poor – and this was an age when one in three children under the age of five died. His parents despaired about his prospects for longevity but the baby boy had spirit.

Modest start in life … Matthew Flinders' birthplace and childhood home in Donington, Lincolnshire.

What’s more, he had arrived in the world at a momentous time in human history and, inspired by the voyages of Cook, he was determined to make his mark.

Flinders is honoured with place names throughout Australia and, on March 16 next year, on what would be his 250th birthday, his remains, which were discovered in a London building excavation after having thought to have been lost for more than a century, will be reburied in Donington at the church in which he was baptised.

Flinders by Grantlee Kieza is out now, published by ABC Books/HarperCollins

Epic story in an engaging form … Flinders by Grantlee Kieza OAM.

Originally published as How Matthew Flinders spent seven years in a tropical prison and came home a broken man