Travel Writing/Writing Travel to Report: Matthew Flinders to Evan Nepean from Coepang Bay Timor

Authors:

Pages: 32-41
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/AVXY9586

Abstract:

Texts authored by maritime explorers occupy a special place in the body of travel literature in English dealing with the exploration of the Pacific in the modern period. This article focuses on a specimen of scientific travel writing in epistolary form authored by Commander Matthew Flinders, the officer under whose command HMS Investigator completed the first circumnavigation of Australia in 1803. I analyse Matthew Flinders’s official despatch to Evan Nepean, Secretary of the Admiralty at the time, as an example of early nineteenth-century epistolary travel writing, paying special attention to the textual strategies employed by Flinders in order to produce a coherent and accurate travel account, on the one hand, and to negotiate his professional status and persona with his interlocutor(s), on the other.

Keywords:

maritime exploration, Pacific, travel, scientific travel writing, epistolary travel writing, official correspondence, Matthew Flinders

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