Love had to wait
exploration and enlightenment flourished during
the regency. matthew flinders achieved hero
status in this era of discovery – for his adventures
and for his romance, asnigelstarck writesI
n persuasion, the last novel
completed by Jane Austen, Captain
Frederick Wentworth has to wait
more than seven years to be
reunited with Anne Elliot, his
first true love. When he
returns from the Napoleonic
Wars in 1814, enriched by
the prizemoney of battle,
that love is allowed to
blossom once more.
Another seafarer and
another Ann (this one,
without a final “e”) had to
endure an even longer – and,
in this case, actual – separation
in the same turbulent period of
history. Matthew Flinders, the English
explorer and veteran of pioneering voyages
to the Southern Ocean and Australia, had
married Ann Chappelle in April, 1801. But
only three months later she was banned by
the British naval authorities from sailing
with her husband on his final and ill-starred
expedition. They would not see each other
again for nine years. Their story is one of
faith, hope and not much charity.
Both had grown up in rural Lincolnshire,
that flat and verdant English county abutting
the North Sea. His home was in the village of
Donington; hers in Partney, a village 30 miles
to the north. Matthew Flinders, born on
March 16, 1774, was the son of a doctor, also
named Matthew, who gave the boy an early
Matthew Flinders was famed for sailing
around Australia and filling in the gaps
on its coastal chartspassion for the natural sciences, especially
astronomy and zoology. Dr Flinders
maintained a hope that his son would follow
him in the practice of medicine, sending
him off to boarding school and then
training him to assist in his own
apothecary shop.
But other forces exerted
a greater influence. Young
Matthew’s cousin, John
Flinders, had gone to sea at
13 as an officer’s servant, seen
action against the French and
the Dutch, sailed across the
Atlantic, and basked in the fame
this gave him within the family.
Then Matthew, already captivated by
his cousin’s exploits, read Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe – and his career path was
settled. It would be the ocean, not surgery.
He studied trigonometry and navigation.
Helped by a recommendation from his
cousin, the 16-year-old Matthew joined
the Royal Navy. Flinders would become
a maritime explorer without equal in the
Regency age: a skilled navigator, eminent
cartographer and fearless ship’s commander- the first to sail right around Australia,
identifying it as a continent. In official
correspondence, he became the first, too,