Does anyone think that the great figures of history REALLY travelled as shown in some of these heroic depictions? Leutze's Washington crossing the Delaware, David's Napoleon Crossing The Alps... Gilbert's Matthew Flinders?

Unlikely. In the first place it would be a bit slack to be standing grandly in the prow while your crew did all the hard work of getting the boat (and your weight) ashore or launched. (It's not clear which here.) In the second it would take only one unexpected shift in the boat to tip you over the side and plant you face first in the mudflats. I think we may therefore take the pose as poetic licence.

Australia has had a significant number of exceptional explorers. Since we were at the end of the Earth at that time, you were either exceptional or you didn't come back. (And many didn't.) British naval captain Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) was one of them. Flinders joined the Royal Navy at age 15 in 1789. He first came to Australia as a 21 year old on HMS Reliance, the ship carrying the second governor of the colony, John Hunter. It was on that voyage that he met George Bass, a doctor and his later exploration companion. Bass and Flinders charted some of the waters to the south of Sydney in a small open boat called the Tom Thumb, with a later variant (the Tomb Thumb II) exploring down to the Illawarra. Which may now be my local area, but back when I took this shot I knew very little about it. Now, I see plaques on some of my running tracks commemorating Bass and Flinders' voyage.

Flinders later found that Tasmania was separate from the mainland of Australia, and the body of water that separated the two was named Bass Strait after his friend and colleague. Flinders went on to circumnavigate Australia in his ship HMS Investigator in 1802 to 1803.

His career was cut shorter than it should have been by being imprisoned by the French in Mauritius for 6 and a half years in 1803. He had been given yet another piece of... ship... to sail back to England in (specifically the Australian-built HMS Cumberland), but was forced to put into the French port for repairs. Having been at sea he was unaware that England and France were then at war and he was arrested as a spy. (Flinders had not been lucky with the ships that he had been given; most of them were deficient in some manner or other.)

He and the Cumberland were freed when the British captured Mauritius in 1810. This allowed him to finally return to his wife Ann for the first time in almost a decade. In 1812 they had their only child, a daughter named Anne.

The imprisonment probably didn't do his health any good. (Although in the later years of it he was given more liberty to move around.) It probably didn't directly cause his death, however. He was only 40 when he died in 1814 from kidney disease. That was the same thing that killed my wolf so I'm aware that it can go from "I don't feel great" to... far, far worse than that in relatively little time.

This statue was erected in 1925. It was created in bronze by Charles Web Gilbert, who died the same year. It stands outside St Paul's Cathedral on the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets, the latter of which was of course named after the man himself.

Edit, March 2025: Flinders died in London, and was buried in a churchyard which was near the then-Euston station. Unfortunately his grave was lost over the years. Almost 10 years after this shot was taken, however, during expansion of the Euston station, his grave was rediscovered. His body was moved back to his birthplace in Lincolnshire, in the north of England. Where Ann ended up... history does not record.

In reality, vast chunks of this description were rewritten today because the dates were all over the place. Fortunately since it was on PBase prior to this, nobody ever saw that and picked up on the errors.