When Flinders was appointed to the command of the Investigator, he was only twenty-seven years of age. But he had already won distinction by his demonstration that Bass Strait was a strait, and not a gulf, a fact not proved by George Bass's famous voyage from Sydney to Westernport in a whale-boat. His circumnavigation of Tasmania--then called Van Diemen's Land--in the Norfolk; the discovery of the Tamar estuary and Port Dalrymple; some excellent nautical surveying among the islands to the north-west of Tasmania; and an expedition along the Queensland coast, had also earned for him the confidence of his official superiors. His ardour for discovery, and the exact, scientific character of his charts and observations, won him a powerful and steadfast friend in Sir Joseph Banks, who had been with Cook in the Endeavour in 1768 to 1771, and never lost his interest in Australian exploration. At the beginning of his naval career Flinders had tasted the "delights of battle." As a midshipman on the Bellerophon (Captain Pasley), he played his small part on the "glorious first of June" (1794), when "Black Dick," Lord Howe, won his greatly vaunted victory over the French off Brest. But before this event his tastes and aspirations had set in the direction of another branch of the naval service. A voyage to the South Seas and the West Indies under Bligh, in the Providence, in 1791, had revealed to his imagination the glory of discovery and the vastness and beauty of the world beyond European horizons. The fame and achievements of Cook were still fresh and wonderful in the mouths of all who followed the sea. Bligh, a superb sailor--not even the enemies whom he made by his rough tongue and brusque manner denied that--taught him to be a scientific navigator; and when he threaded the narrow, coral-walled waters of Torres Strait, he knew that to the southward were coasts as yet unmarked on any chart, seas as yet unploughed by any keel. For this work of exploration Flinders nourished a passion as intense as that which inferior natures have had for love, avarice, or honours. It absorbed all his life and thought; and opportunity, becoming in his case the handmaid of capacity, was abundantly justified by accomplishment.