He knew well what a large field for geographical investigation there was in Australia, and recognised that Flinders was the right man to do the work.

Banks had always foreseen the immense possibilities of the country; he was the means of sending out the naturalists George Caley, Robert Brown, and Allan Cunningham, to study its natural products.

That he was quick to recognise the sterling capacity of Matthew Flinders constitutes his principal claim to our immediate attention.

The spirit of our age is rather out of sympathy with the attitude of patronage, which, as must be confessed, it gratified Banks to assume; but at all events it was, in this instance, patronage of the only tolerable sort, that which helps an able man to fulfil himself and serve his kind.
Before he went to sea again, Flinders was married (April 1801) to Miss Ann Chappell, stepdaughter of the Rev.William Tyler, rector of Brothertoft, near Boston.

She was a sailor's daughter, her own father having died while in command of a ship out of Hull, engaged in the Baltic trade.