From Timor to Mauritius: Matthew Flinders' Island Identity

British navigator Captain Matthew Flinders knew a thing or two about islands. One of his early claims to fame, in 1798-9, was proving that Tasmania is an island, and his major voyage was, as he explains in the first paragraph of Voyage to Terra Australis, designed to discover whether the bits of Australia that had so far been mapped, “instead of forming one great land, be no other than parts of different large islands.”[1] Establishing whether previously charted islands and peninsulas had been correctly identified was part of the routine as he circumnavigated the island continent. I see from the Project Gutenberg text of the voyage that the word ‘island’ is mentioned more than 1000 times in the first volume alone.