Scientific communication in the age of maritime exploration: Matthew Flinders’s circumnavigation of Australia

In this contribution I will analyse the key linguistic features that characterise the different styles of Late Modern scientific writing in English in two texts that were produced to document the first circumnavigation of Australia, completed in 1803 by Commander Matthew Flinders on board HMS Investigator. These two texts are the authorised published account of the voyage (Flinders 1814) and the navigator’s fair journals, recently published, for the first time, by the Hakluyt Society (Morgan 2015a). In order to produce a coherent narrative in the published account of the voyage, Flinders had to rework the compressed logbook entries and other materials recorded originally in the fair journals. The outcome of this operation is a continuum of texts, where, at the opposite ends of the continuum, we find the most technical piece of writing exemplified by the logbook entries and a rigorous piece scientific writing presented in the format of a coherent narrative account, published as A Voyage to Terra Australis (Flinders 1814). I will also discuss Flinders’s published account as a sample of Late Modern scientific discourse by examining its relationship with the tradition of experimental essay-writing in English.