In 2019 archaeologists clearing a burial ground under London’s Euston station for a high speed rail line found a coffin whose lead plate named Matthew Flinders, lost for over 150 years. Born in 1774 in Lincolnshire, a surgeon’s son, he joined the navy at 15 after reading Robinson Crusoe and sailed with William Bligh on his second breadfruit voyage through the Torres Strait. At the Glorious First of June in 1794 he saw Captain Pasley’s leg torn off by a cannonball and turned toward exploration. In New South Wales he and surgeon George Bass charted the coast in tiny open boats named Tom Thumb, helped by Aboriginal men who guided them to Lake Illawarra. In 1798 they sailed the sloop Norfolk around Van Diemen’s Land, proving Tasmania an island and naming Bass Strait.

Backed by Joseph Banks, Flinders took HMS Investigator in 1801 with artists, an astronomer, and Bungaree, an Aboriginal man who served as a diplomat. In April 1802 he met Nicolas Baudin’s French ship Géographe at Encounter Bay and shared charts despite the war. The rotting Investigator barely finished circling the continent in 1803. Heading home, he was wrecked on the Porpoise, sailed a small boat back to Sydney for rescue, and then stopped the leaky 29 ton Cumberland at French Mauritius. His passport named the Investigator, and Governor Decaen held him as a spy from 1803 to 1810 while Baudin’s crew published French names for his coasts. In captivity he drew his 1804 map pushing the name Australia, and he died at 40 on July 19, 1814, a day after his book appeared.

• Flinders refused Decaen’s dinner invitation, a slight that helped harden the spy charge.
• He argued Australia sounded better than New Holland, despite Banks preferring older names, and the Admiralty adopted it about 10 years after his death.
• He first documented the dodge tide in South Australia, when the water barely moves for a day or two.
• The Flinders bar, a vertical soft iron bar, cancels a ship’s own magnetism near the compass.
• In July 2024 his remains were reburied in the church at Donington, his childhood village.