HMS Investigator was the mercantile Fram, launched in 1795, which the Royal Navy purchased in 1798 and renamed HMS Xenophon, and then in 1801 converted to a survey ship under the name HMS Investigator. In 1802, under the command of Matthew Flinders, she was the first ship to circumnavigateAustralia. The Navy sold her in 1810 and she returned to mercantile service under the name Xenophon. She was probably broken up c.1872.
Fram was built in Sunderland as a collier. She operated off the north-east coast of England before the Royal Navy purchased her in 1798. Pitcher, of Northfield refitted her between 27 April and 24 May 1798. She then went to Deptford Dockyard on 6 August. The Navy armed her with 22 carronades to serve as an escort vessel, and renamed her HMS Xenophon.[5]
Commander George Sayer commissioned Xenophon as an armed ship for the North Sea. In 1799 he brought the Irish rebel James Napper Tandy and some of his associates as state prisoners from Hamburg to England.[8] Around February 1800 Sayer removed to HMS Inspector.
Australian voyage
At the urging of the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, the Admiralty decided to launch an expedition to map the Australian coastline, as well as further study the plant and animal life on the new colony. Attached to the expedition was the botanistRobert Brown, the botanical artistFerdinand Bauer and the landscape artistWilliam Westall. The Admiralty chose Xenophon for the expedition: her former mercantile role meant that she had a small draught and ample space for supplies, making her particularly suitable for a long exploratory voyage. On the other hand, she was in relatively poor condition, and could therefore be spared from service in the war against France.
The Navy had Xenophon fitted as a discovery ship at Sheerness between November 1800 and March 1801, and renamed her Investigator.[9] The refitting included making additional cabins for scientists and space on the deck for plant specimens.[1] The armament was reduced to two guns and eight carronades (six 12-pounder and two 18-pounder), providing additional storage space.[7]
On 19 January 1801, the Navy appointed Lieutenant Flinders commander of the Investigator, and he arrived to take command on 25 January. He would later write:
The Investigator was a north-country-built ship, of three-hundred and thirty-four tons; and, in form, nearly resembled the description of a vessel recommended by Captain Cook as best calculated for voyages of discovery. She had been purchased some years before into His Majesty's service; and having been newly coppered and repaired, was considered to be the best vessel which could, at that time, be spared for the projected voyage to Terra Australis.
Investigator set sail from Spithead for Australia on 18 July 1801, calling at the Cape of Good Hope before crossing the Indian Ocean and sighting Cape Leeuwin off South West Australia on 6 December 1801. The expedition put into King George Sound (Albany) for a month before beginning a running survey of the Great Australian Bight, which stretched 2300 kilometres to Spencer Gulf.
On 21 February 1802 a tragic accident occurred when a shore party which included Ships Master John Thistle, midshipman William Taylor and six seamen were lost when a boat capsized attempting to return to the ship at dusk in choppy waters. No bodies were recovered. Flinders named the headland Cape Catastrophe, and the area which he had anchored Memory Cove.
Proceeding into the gulf, Flinders surveyed Port Lincoln (which he named after his home county). Working eastwards Investigator next charted Kangaroo Island, Yorke Peninsula and St Vincent Gulf. On 8 April, at Encounter Bay, a surprise meeting with Géographe under Nicolas Baudin was cordial, the two navigators being unaware the Treaty of Amiens had only just been signed, and both believed the two countries were still at war with one another.
Sailing eastward through Bass Strait, Investigator visited King Island and Port Phillip before arriving at Port Jackson on 9 May 1802. Investigator spent the next ten weeks preparing and took aboard 12 new men, including an aborigine named Bungaree with whom Flinders had previously sailed on the sloop Norfolk. On 22 July Investigator left Port Jackson, sailing north in company with the brig Lady Nelson. The "Lady Nelson" sailed poorly after losing her keels and Flinders ordered her back to Port Jackson.[10]
Investigator hugged the east coast, passed through the Great Barrier Reef and transited Torres Strait (which Flinders had previously sailed with Captain William Bligh on HMSProvidence. While she was surveying the Gulf of Carpentaria the ship's timbers were examined; the dockyard refit/conversion had failed to rectify and fix major faults with the ship, and as the voyage to Australia had revealed, she was in poor shape: the wood was rotting and there were serious extensive leaks. The ship's carpenter reported that she would not last more than six months.
Flinders sailed to the Dutch settlement in Timor hoping to find a replacement, but was unsuccessful. By now a number of the crew were unwell with numerous diseases such as dysentery and scurvy, so Flinders reluctantly cut short the survey and sailed back to Port Jackson "with all possible sail, day and night" to undergo repairs. This meant abandoning his desire for a running survey on the north and west coasts of Australia.
Investigator reached Port Jackson on 9 June 1803 and, on her return to Sydney, Governor Philip Gidley King requested that a survey of the vessel be carried out:
… being the state of the Investigator thus far, we think it altogether unnecessary to make any further examination; being unanimously of opinion that she is not worth repairing in any country, and that it is impossible in this country to put her in a state fit for going to sea.
Flinders left the now decommissioned Investigator as a storeship hulk at Port Jackson and attempted to return to England as a passenger aboard HMS Porpoise.
Later years (1804–1810)
In 1804, Governor King of Sydney ordered a survey, which found that Investigator could be repaired and returned to service. The work involved cutting down the front deck and re-rigging the ship as a brig, to prepare her for another voyage. In 1804 she came under the command of Lieutenant John Houston for local service.[9] While she was at Sydney, Investigator helped raise Lady Barlow, which had sunk at her moorings in a storm on 16 October 1804.
On 23 May 1805 Commander William Kent sailed Investigator back to England,[9] carrying two of Flinder's botanists, Robert Brown and Ferdinand Bauer, and their collections. The ship endured several fierce storms en route but arrived safely at the Port of Liverpool.
In November 1805 Captain Kent was ordered to relocate Investigator to the Port of Plymouth. The voyage was a difficult one despite its brevity. A typhoid fever had come aboard while the ship was in port, incapacitating both lieutenants, the midshipman and one third of the crew. A further six crew members deserted in Liverpool before Investigator sailed. There was no ship's surgeon or medicine aboard, and Captain Kent observed that the provisions in Investigator's hold had long since turned "old and bad."[15]
Investigator was put to sea nonetheless, rounding the tip of Cornwall in heavy storms. A gale off The Lizard carried away most of her sails and rigging and part of the mainmast. Unwilling to risk further damage, Kent abandoned the voyage to Portsmouth and brought Investigator into Falmouth for repairs. Two of the crew died of disease before the ship was ready to return to sea. On 13 November, Kent wrote that a "more deplorable crazy vessel than the Investigator is perhaps not to be seen" in the Navy.[15]
The battered and disease-ridden Investigator arrived in Plymouth harbour on 21 November, where she was declared unseaworthy. On 22 December her crew were paid off and transferred to other vessels. In January 1806 the ship herself was removed from active service and placed in ordinary. Two years later she was reclassified as a prison hulk.[9] A decision was made to sell her for breaking up in 1810. One contemporaneous observer called her, a "noble, hard-working ship which did not deserve this fate".[16] However, she was sold in December to a merchant, George Baily for £1,253.[9]
Commercial service (1810–1872)
Now in private ownership, Investigator was rebuilt as a commercial sailing vessel, brig or snow rigged and reverted to her former naval name Xenophon. She continued to sail extensively around the globe.
The table below details information from Lloyd's Register for several years. In all cases, the data is for Xenophon, launched in 1795 in Sunderland. She first shows up in Lloyd's register in 1817, in which year there are two other Xenophons, both launched in Massachusetts, all of roughly similar sizes, but the American ones are much younger. In no subsequent year in the table below is there a second Xenophon listed.
Her final voyage occurred in 1853, when she put into the Australian port of Geelong on 30 July with a cargo of timber and other goods.[20]Xenophon later continued on to Melbourne, where she was sold and was converted into a storage hulk. She was re-registered in Melbourne in 1861. A further change of ownership occurred in 1868 and the register was closed in 1872 with the comment "broken up".[4]
↑ Christopher, P. & Cundell, N. (editors), (2004), Let’s Go For a Dive, 50 years of the Underwater Explorers Club of SA, published by Peter Christopher, Kent Town, SA, pp.45–49. This describes the search and recovery of the anchors by members of the Underwater Explorers Club of South Australia
↑ Christopher, P. & Cundell, N. (editors), (2004), Let’s Go For a Dive, 50 years of the Underwater Explorers Club of SA, published by Peter Christopher, Kent Town, SA, pp.48
↑ 'HM Sloop Investigator anchor,Archived 29 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine , retrieved 16 July 2012.
James Grant was a Scottish born British Royal Navy officer and navigator in the early nineteenth century. He served in Australia in 1800–1801 and was the first to map the Bass Strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania.
Scarborough was a double-decked, three-masted, ship-rigged, copper-sheathed, barque that participated in the First Fleet, assigned to transport convicts for the European colonisation of Australia in 1788. Also, the British East India company (EIC) chartered Scarborough to take a cargo of tea back to Britain after her two voyages transporting convicts. She spent much of her career as a West Indiaman, trading between London and the West Indies, but did perform a third voyage in 1801–02 to Bengal for the EIC. In January 1805 she repelled a French privateer of superior force in a single-ship action, before foundering in April.
Surprize was a three-deck merchant vessel launched in 1780 that made five voyages as a packet ship under charter to the British East India Company (EIC). She also participated in the notorious Second Fleet, transporting convicts to Port Jackson. A French frigate captured her in the Bay of Bengal in 1799.
The Colonial sloop Norfolk was built on Norfolk Island in 1798 of Norfolk Island Pine. She was wrecked in 1800.
His Majesty's Armed Survey Vessel Lady Nelson was commissioned in 1799 to survey the coast of Australia. At the time large parts of the Australian coast were unmapped and Britain had claimed only part of the continent. The British Government were concerned that, in the event of settlers of another European power becoming established in Australia, any future conflict in Europe would lead to a widening of the conflict into the southern hemisphere to the detriment of the trade that Britain sought to develop. It was against this background that Lady Nelson was chosen to survey and establish sovereignty over strategic parts of the continent.
Captain Matthew Flinders was a British navigator and cartographer who led the first inshore circumnavigation of mainland Australia, then called New Holland. He is also credited as being the first person to utilise the name Australia to describe the entirety of that continent including Van Diemen's Land, a title he regarded as being "more agreeable to the ear" than previous names such as Terra Australis.
Nine ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Investigator. Another was planned, but renamed before being launched. The name Investigator passed on to the Royal Indian Navy and after India's Independence, to its successor the Indian Navy where the lineage of naming survey ships Investigator continues unbroken.
A Voyage to Terra Australis: Undertaken for the Purpose of Completing the Discovery of that Vast Country, and Prosecuted in the Years 1801, 1802, and 1803, in His Majesty's Ship the Investigator was a sea voyage journal written by British 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 to 1810.
John Allen was a lead miner, notable as a junior member of the party of naturalists that accompanied the 1801–1803 voyage of HMS Investigator under Matthew Flinders.
Francis was a 41 tons (bm) colonial schooner that was partially constructed at the Deptford Dockyard, England, and sent in frame aboard the Pitt to Australia to be put together for the purposes of exploration. The vessel had originally been designed for George Vancouver’s discovery voyage of the west coast of North America.
Friendship was a three-decker merchantman, launched in 1793. She made three voyages for the British East India Company (EIC). During her first voyage, in 1796, a French privateer captured her, but the Royal Navy recaptured her. On the second, in 1799, she transported convicts from Ireland to Australia. She made a second voyage transporting convicts in 1817-18. On her way back she was broken up in 1819 at Mauritius after having been found unseaworthy.
Rolla was a sailing ship built in 1800 at South Shields, England. She made one voyage transporting convicts to New South Wales. She then made a voyage for the British East India Company from China back to Britain. She leaves Lloyd's Register in 1858.
Atlas was built in Souths Shields by Temple and launched in 1801 for Temple. She made two voyages transporting convicts from Ireland or England to Port Jackson. On the first voyage she carried cargo for the British East India Company (EIC). On the second she sailed to Bengal after delivering her convicts to New South Wales and was wrecked off India in 1820 while on her way back to Britain.
Boyd was a brigantine built in 1783 at Limehouse on the river Thames, England. She originally traded as a West Indiaman, sailing between London and Saint Kitts. Then between 1795 and 1797 she performed a voyage for the British East India Company (EIC). The French captured her as she was homeward bound, but her owners repurchased her in 1803. In 1804 the French captured her again, but the Royal Navy recaptured her and returned her to her owners. In 1809 she transported convicts to New South Wales for the British government. After delivering the convicts she sailed to New Zealand where Maori warriors attacked her, killing, and eating, almost her entire crew and passengers. They then burnt her.
The HMS Investigator Anchors are the two anchors that jettisoned from HMS Investigator on the morning of Saturday, 21 May 1803, by her commander, Matthew Flinders, in order to avoid running aground on Middle Island in the Archipelago of the Recherche on the south coast of New Holland. In 1973, the anchors were located and recovered by members of the Underwater Explorers Club of South Australia (UEC). The recovered anchors became the subject of an ownership dispute between various governments, particularly those of South Australia and Western Australia due to their historic significance as artefacts of a major voyage of European exploration. The dispute was resolved with the ownership of the anchors going to the Australian Government who subsequently gifted one of the anchors to the South Australian Government. The pair of artefacts is also known as Flinders' Anchors.
Vice-Admiral Robert Merrick Fowler was an officer of the Royal Navy notable for his service as the second-in-command to Matthew Flinders on HMS Investigator from 1801 to 1803 and for his involvement in Battle of Pulo Aura in 1804.
Countess of Sutherland was launched in 1801 at Tittaghur on the Hooghly River, about 15 miles upstream from Calcutta. She made one voyage from Calcutta to England for the British East India Company in 1801–1802. The French captured her in 1803 as she was sailing from Bengal to China. They used her as a hulk until she was broken up c.1821.
Cornwall was launched in 1794 as a West Indiaman. In a little more than three years later she had left on the first of three whaling voyages to the Southern Whale Fishery. On her first whaling voyage she captured a Spanish ship and fought off a French privateer. After her third whaling voyage Cornwall returned to the West Indies trade. Around 1817 new owners sent her to India where a Parsi merchant purchased her. She traded in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, and also participated as a transport in a naval expedition to the Persian Gulf. She was last listed in 1824.
Kingston was launched at Bristol in 1780 as a West Indiaman. From 1798 she made ten voyages as a whaler. Somewhat unusually, on her first voyage she participated in the capture of a Spanish merchant ship. She then briefly sailed between England and Quebec, and was last listed in 1819.
Chesterfield was built in America in 1781, but it is not clear where and under what name. She arrived in England in 1791. Between 1792 and 1798 Chesterfield made three voyages to the southern whale fishery. On the first of these her crew was involved in a sanguinary encounter with the local inhabitants of an island in Torres Strait. Also in 1793, on the first voyage, her captain named the Chesterfield Islands after his vessel, or her namesake. After her whaling voyages new owners sailed her to trade with the Mediterranean. A Spanish privateer captured her in 1805.
References
Bladen, F. M., ed. (1979). Historical records of New South Wales. Vol. 5, King, 1803, 1804, 1805. Lansdown Slattery & Co. ISBN9780868330006.
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