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Royal Navy navigator and key figure in birth of Australia reburied with full honours
15 July 2024
Royal Navy pallbearers helped lay one of its greatest explorers to rest in his birthplace – more than two centuries after his death.
Captain Matthew Flinders – the first person to map Australia and introduce the name to common usage - is now at rest in the soil of his native Lincolnshire.
An 18-gun salute sounded as his coffin, draped with the Australian flag, was gently lowered into a new grave in the Church of St Mary and the Holy Rood in Donington, near Spalding.
Flinders died in London in 1814. His remains were discovered five years ago during work on the HS2 railway project near Euston Station, since when residents of Flinders’ home village have campaigned vigorously to “bring him home” to Lincolnshire.
At the weekend that wish was realised – with full religious and naval honours.
The Royal Navy provided a burial party, representatives from Australia and Mauritius – the officer was held as a prisoner during the Napoleonic Wars – were present and the Bishop of Lincoln presided over the reinterment.
Commander Andy Swain from the Naval Regional Command Eastern England – and himself a specialist hydrographic surveyor – was the senior Royal Navy representative at the reburial service and has the highest regard for Flinders and his achievements.
“The United Kingdom Hydrographic Office was founded in 1795 and therefore the charts and records of his surveys are some of the first documents that were submitted to that archive,” he explained.
“I had the tremendous privilege recently of looking through some of his original survey charts. The detail he captured is amazing, and it still hold as accurate today.
“The skill and dedication required by him and his crew to create highly accurate surveys of the uncharted world, most notably Australia using the technology available at the time is truly inspiring.”
Although largely unknown in present-day UK – it is the name of Captain Cook, not Flinders most Britons associate with the discovery/early settlement of Australia – the young Royal Navy officer is regarded as one of the seminal figures in the founding of the modern Commonwealth nation.
Over 11 months in 1802 and 1803, Flinders, not year 30 years old, guided HMS Investigator counter-clockwise around the sub-continent – then known as terra australis or New Holland – proving it was an island, albeit a huge one.
While trying to return to Britain, he was forced to put into port in Mauritius – then a French colony – and spent six years in captivity, where he worked on his charts and memoirs.
Eventually released, Flinders settled in London and completed his manuscript – A Voyage to Terra Australis – published just days before he died of kidney disease in July 1814.
He was buried in a cemetery off Hampstead Road in Camden, which eventually fell into disuse, became a public park, and was eventually built over by Euston Station.
It was found during excavations for the high-speed rail link – Flinders was identified by his well-preserved lead coffin plate.
That plate is being sent to Australia for display in a museum.
Present day images credited to: Stephen Daniels/DANPICS