Download The Great Race: The Race Between the English and the French to Complete the Map of Australia AudioBook Free
On the day of 8 Apr 1802, in the distant southern sea, two explorers experienced a exceptional chance encounter. Englishman Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicolas Baudin have been dispatched by their governments on a single quest: to explore the uncharted coastline of the great south land and discover whether the western world and east coasts, four thousand kilometres apart, were area of the same island. And so began the contest to put together the definitive map of Australia. These men's journeys were the culmination of 2 hundred many years of exploration of the region by the Dutch - most famously Abel Tasman - the Portuguese, the Spanish and by Englishmen such as the colourful pirate William Dampier and, of course, Wayne Cook. The three-year voyages of Baudin and Flinders would see them put up with awful hardships in the spirit of breakthrough. They experienced scurvy and warmth exhaustion, and Flinders was shipwrecked and imprisoned - always knowing he was competing with the France to produce the first map of this mysterious continent. Written from diaries and other first-hand accounts, this is actually the thrilling history of men whose drawings saved countless previously unidentified species and converted mythical creatures into real ones, and whose skill and perseverance allowed Terra Australis Incognita to be Australia.
