Mariners Are Warned!

As the middle of the 1800s approached, the British Hydropgraphic Office undertook a series of surveying voyages, the first commanded by Matthew Flinders and the second by Phillip Parker King. The third voyage - the subject of this book - lasted six years and was undertaken by H.M.S. Beagle, captained by John Lort Stokes. Stokes discovered the Fitzroy, Albert and Flinders rivers and Port Darwin, and his most notable achievement was the charting of that graveyard of sailing ships - Bass Strait. Undoubtedly a sober, conscientious and earnest man, his occasional acts of breathtaking foolhardiness bring the reader up short - as they must have done his men. Is it really Stokes who, in disregarding the tide, twice risked his own and other lives on a whim; who staged the daredevil escapes from crocodiles; and who embodied the tantalising image of a man running alone, half-crazed, towards the centre of Australia? Mariners are Warned! is an urbane book written with empathy by a fellow mariner. It has a particularly strong sense of relatedness to times past and present. A chain of association and shared service links Stokes with Flinders and King and thence with Bligh and the venerated Cook.