Cato & HMS Porpoise

Searching for Flinders’ ships

A shipwrecked navigator

Matthew Flinders, celebrated navigator of the Australian coasts and seas, was returning to England aboard Porpoise, a captured Spanish sloop of 308 tonnes, in want of another survey vessel, when he was wrecked on an uncharted reef.

Porpoise was sailing in company with two other vessels: Cato, an English armed merchantman of 430 tonnes, and Bridgewater, a 32-gun East India Company ship of 750 tonnes. When Porpoise struck, the other two tacked to avoid the same fate, but unfortunately tacked towards each other. Cato changed course to avoid a collision and also hit the reef.

Bridgewater escaped the rocks and seemed to make an attempt to return and help, but then sailed away and left them to their fate.

In December 2009, a collaborative expedition took the Silentworld Foundation and Australian National Maritime Museum teams to the aptly named Wreck Reefs in search of the vessels and the survivors’ camp.