By Isobel Marriner of The New Zealand Herald
Isobel Marriner joins the Queen Mary 2 for the first royal circumnavigation of Australia, following the journey of a famous explorer - though in a rather more opulent style
More than 200 years ago, a young naval officer called Matthew Flinders set sail from England, intending to circumnavigate and map the coastline of what was then New Holland and New South Wales, but which he would later prefer to call Terra Australis, the great Southern Land.
Flinders was not of maritime stock; the son of a doctor, he had been bewitched by the sea after reading Robinson Crusoe. Just married, he had intended (against Admiralty regulations) to take his wife with him on his ship, the Investigator, a recommissioned naval sloop originally built as a collier. But before the ship left British waters it ran aground while he was below deck with Mrs Flinders, and in the ensuing furore he was forced to leave her behind.
Two centuries later, black, sleek and enormous, the Queen Mary 2 is berthed at the container port at the end of the Brisbane river and is visible for many kilometres around. She would have dwarfed the Investigator, which measured about a 10th of her size.
Continue article at: nzherald.co.nz
