Book review: The Great Race

FIRST published in Australia in 2012, and subtitled ‘the race between the English and the French to complete the map of Australia’, the thought that first goes through the mind is whether this non-fiction book might be a semi-factualisation of one of CS Forester’s seafaring novels.

Australian author, David Hill, has other ideas, however. Whatever derring-do is here (and there’s a lot) is derived not from dashing tales of fictional Royal Navy officers like Horatio Hornblower but from real life 18th century adventurers such as Englishman Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicholas Baudin.

Both men, strangers to each other, had been sent by their respective governments on the same exploratory mission: to navigate the uncharted coast of what was known as the Great South Land, and to discover whether the west and east coasts — 4,000 kilometres apart — were actually part of the same land mass. The mark was set, and the race began.

Of course, as Hill diligently explains, both men were standing on the shoulders of previous explorers from a range of countries.

Adventurers (and mercenaries) from Portugal, Spain and Holland had, in the 16th and 17th centuries, happened upon parts of the Great South Land that were either environmentally hostile or financially unexploitable, and it wasn’t until close to the end of the late 18th century that serious consideration was given to further exploration.

Up until around this time, much of the world was unknown to Europeans, and Australia (as it became) was thought to be either divided down the middle by a large stretch of water, attached to Tasmania (formerly known as Van Diemen’s Land, and discovered by Dutchman Abel Tasman in 1642), or joined to Antarctica. Indeed, some seafarers were hard pressed to believe that what lay beyond the Great South Land was anything other than the end of the world.

Exploring and discovering such regions was also dangerous, notably due to the difficulty navigators experienced of calculating their longitude (the distance travelled from east to west), which didn’t become an exact science until the invention of reliable mechanical clocks. In short, shipwrecks were an inevitability. Participants on this great adventure, therefore, were motivated by either money or fame. But not Flinders, apparently.

In one of too-many-to-list pieces of quite superb research, Hill documents that the ambitions of the Royal Navy officer were somewhat different from his merchant and trader friends: “I have too much ambition to rest in the unnoticed middle order of mankind,” writes Flinders to friend and former ship’s surgeon, George Bass, “Since neither fame nor fortune have favoured me, my actions shall speak to the world. In the regular service of the navy there are too many competitors for fame.

“I have therefore chosen a branch which, though less rewarded by rank and fortune, is yet little less in celebrity … Although I cannot rival the immortalised name of Captain Cook, yet if persevering industry, joined with what ability I may possess, can accomplish it, then I will secure a second place.”

In order to make such a research-driven book work for readers that may have merely a casual interest in the subject matter, Hill is astute enough to focus on Flinders the man as much as the explorer. And so we discover aspects of him as much as the lengthy (and not always riveting) minutiae of his deeds. A flawed hero, is Flinders, as we discover that at the start of his epic voyage in 1801 he attempted to smuggle his wife on board his ship. Rapped by the Royal Navy for such a misdemeanor, the couple were separated for more than nine years.

Other aspects of the man are allowed to filter through, notably with complementary items such as maps, pictures and crafted descriptive details. Occasionally, the narrative pace accelerates, particularly in the documenting of Flinders’s shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef.

And Hill’s portrayal of life at sea while charting such undiscovered territory is compelling, detailing the horrific side effects of dysentery and, specifically, scurvy (which was eradicated only when fresh fruit and vegetables became part of the seafarers’ staple diet).

Factor in other discomforting elements such as humidity, mosquitoes, weevils, rats, lack of water replaced by urine-drinking, and you have a vivid and often appalling picture of life at sea in the 18th century.

Another interesting side to the story is the contrast between the two nations chasing the same prize: while Royal Navy ships were skippered by officers from (relatively) modest backgrounds, French ships (prior to the French Revolution, anyway) were commanded by aristocrats.

In marked contrast to the British, the French explorations were undermined by desertions (including officers). And the French expeditions were, ostensibly at least, marginally more scientific-based.

Another fascinating, indeed enlightening, difference highlighted by Hill was attitudes towards colonisation: in a letter from Nicholas Baudin to the governor of New South Wales, the French explorer thoughtfully queries the justification of Europeans seizing, in the name of their governments, “a land seen for the first time, when it is inhabited by men who have not always deserved the titles of savages or cannibals that has freely been given them.” Liberty, equality and brotherhood, how are you?

Did it all come to nought, this race between rivals? Now, of course, it doesn’t really matter — except, perhaps, to historians. Then? While the French published the first complete coastal map of Australia in 1811 it wasn’t viewed in the same celebrated historical light as that of Flinders, who published the British version in 1814.

Battling against the weight of research and the occasional wobbly balancing of best intentions and structural know-how (a fight that isn’t always victorious), Hill’s book probably won’t offer many fresh revelations to dedicated students of the period. Those unfamiliar with this particular story of discovery, however, will find in The Great Race (and its very useful bibliography) an instructive introduction.