"I put an end, I hope, to our correspondence for some months, concluding that you will sail immediately," wrote Sir Joseph Banks in June, "and with sincere good wishes for your future prosperity, and with a firm belief that you will, in your future conduct, do credit to yourself as an able investigator, and to me as having recommended you." The true spirit of friendship breathes in those words, the friendship, too, of a discerning judge of character for a younger man whom he respected and trusted.

The trust was nobly justified.

Flinders undertook the work with the firm determination to do his work thoroughly.

"My greatest ambition," he had written some weeks previously (April 29),"is to make such a minute investigation of this extensive and very interesting country that no person shall have occasion to come after me to make further discoveries." It was with that downright resolve that Flinders set out, and in that spirit did he pursue his task to its end.

It was not for nothing that this man was the nautical grandson of Cook.
Sailing orders arrived from London on July 17th, and on the following day the Investigator sailed from Spithead.