The Mauritius governor, General Charles
De Caën, believed him to be a spy. Flinders
was held captive; first in a tavern and then
at a plantation, where he was at least free to
walk the countryside, play his flute, work on
his maps, compose a treatise on magnetic
variation, improve his command of French
and, above all, write letters to Ann. They
survive today as a cry from the heart, as heard
in this letter of August 1804: “I cannot connect
the idea of happiness with anything but thee.
Without thee, the world would be blank.”
There would be more such outpouring of
despair. Those letters in some instances took
years to arrive, so haphazard was the mail; at
one stage, starved of accurate communication
and misled by reports of a former vessel’s
loss, Ann took to wearing the black robes of
a widow. But on receiving more reassuring
information, she rallied and set about finding
a ship to join her husband in Mauritius.
Flinders, while moved by such fortitude,
dissuaded her; at a time of war with France, it
would be too dangerous, he wrote.
The torment was made all the worse
by a deep animosity that arose between
gaoler and prisoner. Governor De Caën was
offended by what he regarded as his captive’s
arrogance and disrespect; in his journal,
Flinders simply described his adversary as a
“barbarian”. It took a distressingly prolonged
chain of official appeals and diplomatic
dispatches, along with sanctioned exchanges
of prisoners, before release eventually came.
Flinders was allowed to board a British ship
on June 10, 1810, noting in his diary the end of
incarceration for “six years, five months and
twenty-seven days”.
When Ann was re-united with him, in
October, she encountered a man appearing
much older than 36. He had incurable
kidney damage, after all those punishing
voyages when drinking water was so scarce;
he suffered, too, from blood and crystals in
his urine. But there was a job to be done and
a legacy to be established. Flinders worked
assiduously at his book A Voyage to Terra
Australis (Latin for South Land), completing
it shortly before his death. He had funded
the enterprise himself, ultimately at a small
loss. Its charts, nevertheless, would profit
navigators for decades on. Remarkably, there
was also a triumph of a more intimate kind:
the frail explorer and his middle-aged wife
produced a child, Anne Flinders, born on
April 1, 1812.
All this was achieved in straitened
circumstances. The Admiralty promoted
Flinders to the rank of captain, but back-
dated the pay scale only to May 1810, when he
had boarded the prisoner-exchange ship.The chart made by Flinders, after he had
established that the Australian continent
comprised a single land mass with a large
island to the south, now known as Tasmania