praise for my good intentions. I hope that it will not be thought
presumptuous in me to say that no blame ought to be attributed to
me...The Admiralty do not seem to take much into consideration that I had
no master appointed, who ought to be the pilot, or that having been
constantly employed myself in foreign voyages I cannot consequently have
much personal knowledge of the Channel. In truth, I had nothing but the
chart and my own general observations to direct me; and had the former
been at all correct we should have arrived here as safe as if we had any
number of pilots."

It is significant of Flinders' truth-telling habit of mind that when he
came to write the history of the voyage, published thirteen years later,
he did not pass over the incident at the Roar, though he can hardly have
remembered as agreeable an event for which he was blamed when he was not
wrong. But perhaps he found satisfaction in being able to write that the
circumstance "showed the necessity there was for a regulation, since
adopted, to furnish His Majesty's ships with correct charts." A natural
comment is that it is odd that so obviously sensible a thing was not done
until an accident showed the danger of not doing it. The blame
temporarily put upon Flinders did no harm to his credit, and was probably
merely an oblique form of self-reproach on the part of the Admiralty.

The Investigator arrived at Spithead on June 2nd, but did not receive
final sailing orders till more than another month had elapsed. "I put an
end, I hope, to our correspondence for some months, concluding that you
will sail immediately," wrote Sir Joseph Banks in June, "and with sincere
good wishes for your future prosperity, and with a firm belief that you
will, in your future conduct, do credit to yourself as an able
investigator, and to me as having recommended you." The true spirit of
friendship breathes in those words, the friendship, too, of a discerning
judge of character for a younger man whom he respected and trusted. The
trust was nobly justified. Flinders undertook the work with the firm
determination to do his work thoroughly. "My greatest ambition," he had
written some weeks previously (April 29),"is to make such a minute
investigation of this extensive and very interesting country that no
person shall have occasion to come after me to make further discoveries."
It was with that downright resolve that Flinders set out, and in that
spirit did he pursue his task