Explorer was buried in home town after his remains were found during construction of UK’s high speed rail
The small sheet of lead, which once adorned a coffin that was lost under London for 200 years, now sits in a slick new building in the Adelaide CBD.
“Capt. Matthew Flinders RN, died 19 July 1814, aged 40 years,” it says, the ornate writing legible despite signs of age.
Flinders is credited with naming Australia, and was the first European to circumnavigate the vast continent.
When he arrived home from his travels in 1810 after a series of adventures (including years in detention in Mauritius) he was ill with kidney disease.
He died at about the same time his book, A Voyage to Terra Australis, was published, and was buried in St James’s burial ground near Euston station. But his headstone was removed, and the location of his remains forgotten – although urban myths abounded that he was under platform 12 or 15.
In 2019 during the construction of the HS2 – a high-speed rail network in the UK – tens of thousands of bodies were exhumed from the old burial ground.
HS2’s head of heritage, Helen Wass, said archaeologists worked out roughly where Flinders was located.
“Ultimately, during the careful excavation of the burial ground, [they found] his coffin plate, and because it was lead, it was preserved in the ground,” she says. “We have a lot of tin plate, and that just rots away if it gets wet. So we were really fortunate.
“And then the archaeologists were excavating it and started to reveal the C and the A and the P … so that was just an amazing moment.”
Last year, Flinders’ remains were reinterred in his home town of Donington, Lincolnshire. He was buried with a replica coffin plate (also called a breast plate) and the real one was given to South Australia’s governor, Frances Adamson, to bring to Australia.
The state’s university is named for the explorer, as are a number of streets, suburbs and geographical features, including the Flinders Ranges, Flinders Island and the Flinders Chase national park on Kangaroo Island.
The History Trust of SA is now looking after it, along with its display at Flinders University. Trust senior curator, Tony Kanellos, showed Guardian Australia through the collection, which includes a first edition of Terra Australis, buttons from Flinders’ jacket, his sun dial/compass, and a picture of Bungaree, an Aboriginal man who accompanied him on his voyage.
“There’s a little bit of awe … for historians, Matthew Flinders is a really important character, but for the rest of the population, they should know who he is,” he says.
“Is he a hero? A scientist, an explorer, a navigator, a cartographer?”
Putting these objects on display helps to humanise Flinders, Kanellos says, and gets people to think about who he was and what he did.
While Flinders is in his final resting place, his coffin plate has one more stop, and will eventually be on display in a maritime museum in Port Adelaide.
