Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) was an English naval captain and hydrographer who prepared detailed charts of much of the Australian coastline.

Matthew Flinders was born on March 16, 1774, at Donnington, Lincolnshire, and educated in a local grammar school. Instead of becoming a surgeon like his father, he entered the Royal Navy at 15 and accompanied William Bligh on his second voyage to Tahiti in 1791. In 1794 Flinders saw action against the French in the English Channel and the following year went to New South Wales.

Accompanied in 1796 by George Bass, a naval surgeon, Flinders first explored Botany Bay and the coastline south of Sydney in an 8-foot open boat, the Tom Thumb. Between October 1798 and January 1799 Flinders and Bass, who had recently discovered the Bass Strait separating Tasmania from the mainland, sailed around Tasmania in the sloop Norfolk. In the summer of 1799 Flinders surveyed the coastline north of Sydney as far as...