A Voyage to Terra Australis

A Voyage to Terra Australis is a two-volume sea voyage journal written by English mariner and explorer Matthew Flinders. It describes his circumnavigation of the Australian continent in the early years of the 19th century, and his imprisonment by the French on the island of Mauritius from 1804-1810. The book tells in great detail of his explorations and included maps and drawings of the profiles of unknown coastline areas of what Flinders called 'Terra Australis Incognita'. By this, he was referring to the great unknown Southern continent that had been sighted and partly mapped by prominent earlier mariners such as Captain James Cook.

Captain Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) was an English navigator and cartographer who led the first inshore circumnavigation of the landmass that is now known as Australia. He is also credited as being the first person to utilise the name Australia to describe the entirety of that continent. Flinders was involved in several voyages of discovery between 1791 and 1803, the most famous of which is the circumnavigation around Australia.