Flinders completed the first circumnavigation of the “Terra
Australis Incognita,” or “Unknown South Land,” in 1803. A
decade later, he compiles his writings, maps, charts, and
drawings of the rugged coasts, extensive reefs, fertile slopes,
unusual wildlife, and other features of the faraway continent
that he suggests naming “Australia.”
His wife places a copy of the freshly printed book, A Voyage
to Terra Australis, in his hands as he lies unconscious in their
central London home the day before his death in July 1814.
Later, he’s interred at St. James’s burial ground, but within a
few decades, the tombstone is missing. When the railways at
nearby Euston Station expand in the mid-1800s, workers re-
locate, pave over, or strip graves. Lost in a subterranean terra
incognita, the explorer might lie somewhere under track 12. Or- Or the garden that’s replaced the cemetery. No one knows.
Today, a bronze Flinders at the station entrance crouches
over a map alongside his beloved cat Trim, who also made
the trip around Australia. If the statue could lift its head,
it would see commuters rushing across the plaza past con-
struction barriers. The hub is expanding again, now as a
new terminus of the huge HS2 high-speed rail project,
which will connect the capital with points north.
This time, though, a team is carefully exhuming and
documenting remains before the tunnel-boring, track- laying,
and platform-building begins. They know that Flinders
and an estimated 61,000 others were buried here between
1789 and 1853. But, with only 128 out-of-place headstones
remaining, they don’t know who they’ll find.
Caroline Raynor, an archaeologist with the construction
company Costain, leads the excavation. On a typically over-
cast day in January 2019, she oversees work beneath what
she calls her “cathedral to archaeology,” a white bespoke
but he looks seventy. His once dark hair gleams
white, his already slight frame skeletal. As a captain
in the British Royal Navy, he’s survived shipwreck,
imprisonment, and scurvy, but this kidney infection
will do him in. Facing death, he finishes writing a book
that will change the world as Europeans know it.tent so massive that it could house a Boeing- It shields a hard-hat-clad crew of more
than 100—and the dead, sometimes stacked in
columns of up to 10 as much as 27 feet deep.
Where the London clay is waterlogged and
oxygenless, delicate materials survive. Clearing
earth by hand and trowel over the course of a
yearslong job, Raynor’s diggers uncover bodies
wearing wooden prosthetics, as well as the Dick-
ensian bonnets that used to hold the deads’
mouths closed. One man still sports blue slippers
from Bombay. Even plants and flowers remain.
“Some of them were still green,” Raynor says.
Suddenly, a crewmember runs over with
news about a grave fairly near the surface. Very
little of the coffin is intact—wood doesn’t fare
well in the granular, free-draining topsoil—so
there’s nothing to open. A lead breastplate rests
atop a bare skeleton: “Capt. Matthew Flinders
R.N. Died July 1814 Aged 40 Years.”
The discovery is one small chapter in the
saga the HS2 project promises to tell. If the first
stage of the $115 billion initiative is fully realized,
the train will cut through ancient woodlands,
suburbs, and cities along the 143 miles between
Birmingham in the north and London in the
south—though not before teams like Raynor’s
uncover any underground treasures. “It looks
like we’re finding archaeology from every phase
of post-glacial history,” says Mike Court, the ar-
chaeologist overseeing the more than 60 planned
digs for HS2 Ltd., the entity carrying out the rail
initiative. “It’s going to give us an opportunity to
have a complete story of the British landscape.”
With more than 1,000 scientists and conser-
vators involved, the scale of HS2’s excavations
is unprecedented in the UK, and perhaps all
of Europe. However, it’s hardly an outlier. As
development continues to tear through hidden
civilizations across the continent, investigations
like this are becoming common; in fact, they’re
often required by legislation. While research-
ers once bored trenches exclusively on behalf of
museums and universities, many now work on
job sites. These commercial archaeologists dig
up and analyze finds for private companies like
the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA),
a primary contractor on HS2. Because their
work is tied to the pace and scale of building
projects, their targets are quite random, and
discoveries can be boom or bust. Sometimes
they’ll unearth just a few graves during hous-
ing construction; other times they’ll turn up
dizzying amounts of data on battlefields and
cemeteries in the path of huge public works.
When efforts at Euston wrapped in December
MATTHEW
FLINDERS
IS BARELY
FORTY,
PopSci.com / Spring 2020 / PG 90