on life and nature like a spell. A few years previously he
had been a schoolboy in the flattest, most monotonous of English shires.
Broad fields, dykes and fen had composed the landscape most familiar to
his eye. In these surroundings he had dreamed, as a boy will, of
palm-fanned islands in distant climes, of adventures with savage peoples,
of strange seas where great fishes are, and where romance touches all
that is with its purple light. Far horizons steeped in marvels had
bounded the vision of his imagining eye. His passion was to see and do in
realms at the back of the sunrise. He wanted to sail and explore in parts
represented by blank spaces on the map.

These dreams of the boy, basking with Robinson Crusoe under remote skies,
were suddenly translated into a reality as dazzling-bright and wonderful
as anything pictured in pages often and fondly conned. This was his first
voyage, and he was serving under a commander who had lived the romance
that other men wrote and read about, who was himself a living part of an
adventure whose story will be told and re-told to the centuries, and who
had served under as great and noble a captain as ever trod an English
deck.

The very nature of the voyage was bound to stimulate that "passion for
exploring new countries," to use Flinders' own phrase, the hope for which
was a strong factor in prompting him to choose the sea as a career. It
was a voyage whose primary object involved a stay in two of the loveliest
regions on the earth, the paradise of the Pacific and the gem-like
Antilles. The pride and pleasure of participation in discovery were his
forthwith. A new passage through an intricate and dangerous Strait was
found and charted; a whole archipelago was delineated, named, and taken
possession of for the British nation. The world's knowledge was
increased. There was something put down on the map which was not there
before. The contact with the islanders in the Strait gave a brisk element
of adventure to the expedition; and certainly Papuan warriors are foes as
wild and weird as any adventurer can desire to meet. The rescuing of
wrecked mariners at Tahiti added a spice of adventure of another sort.
From beginning to end, indeed, this voyage must have been as full of
charm as of utility.

The effect it had upon the future life of Matthew Flinders was very
striking. The whole of the salient features of his later career follow
from it. He made the most of his opportunities. Capt