View of the Wreck-Reef Bank, taken from low water.

William Westall was a Royal Academy artist appointed to Matthew Flinders voyage at 19 years of age. His method of drawing topographical views was to rule up his drawing sheets in a grid pattern to obtain an accurate perspective. "After Flinders' 'Investigator' was condemned as unseaworthy at Sydney in 1803, ending his Australian survey, he embarked with Westall as passengers in HM sloop 'Porpoise' to return to England, in company with the storeship 'Cato' and the Indiaman 'Bridgewater'. They sailed on 10 August 1803 but on the 17th both 'Porpoise' and 'Cato' ran aground 800 miles north of Sydney, on a sandbank subsequently known as Wreck Reef (or Reefs), part of the Great Barrier Reef. Both were quickly holed by coral and the larger 'Cato' broke up. Three men were lost but everyone else escaped onto a nearby dry bank, where they camped as shown in the painting, having salvaged what they could (including many but not all of Westall's drawings). The grounded and dismasted hull of the 'Porpoise' (a Spanish-built packet schooner captured in 1799) can be seen at far left. The 'Bridgewater' sailed on and later reported both ships lost without survivors. After nearly ten days without sign of help, Flinders then sailed back to Sydney in the 'Porpoise's' cutter and returned with the 29-ton schooner 'Cumberland', the schooner 'Frances' and the East Indiaman 'Rolla', which was bound for Canton, to pick people up. The 'Frances' took a few people back to Sydney: the majority, including Westall, went on to China in 'Rolla' as the next stage homeward. He first did some brief work there and then more during three months at Bombay before reaching England again in 1804. Flinders sailed directly from Wreck Reef for England with a selected volunteer crew in the 'Cumberland', but was detained on Mauritius as a prisoner of war for nearly six years after putting in there for repairs, owing to the schooner's leaky condition. Although Flinders had a French passport, this had been made out for 'Investigator', not personally for him and his crew in any other ship, and his high-handed approach to General Decaen, the French governor (who decided to treat him as a spy), was not well calculated to gain co-operative and early release. He only reached England again in October 1810. The image was engraved as one of the plates in Flinders ‘A Voyage to Terra Australis' (1814, and also separately published that year in Westall's 'Views of Australian Scenery'). It is the last plate in vol. 2, illustrating the dated journal text about the incident." (Royal Museums Greenwich catalog ZBA7935)
"One of the greatest of all classics of Australian exploration and discovery... Flinders' classic account of his voyage on board the Investigator records the full-scale expedition to discover and explore the entire coastline of Australia (which was the name that Flinders himself preferred and championed). The three volumes form a complete narrative of the expedition, including an authoritative introductory history of maritime exploration in Australian waters from the earliest times. The text contains a day-by-day account of the Investigator voyage and Flinders's later voyages on the Porpoise and the Cumberland. Robert Brown's "General Remarks, geographical and systematical, on the Botany of Terra Australis", which is illustrated by Ferdinand Bauer's botanical plates in the atlas, is printed as an appendix in the second volume. The text is illustrated by nine engraved plates and two double-page plates of coastal views in the atlas by the landscape painter William Westall, who travelled as official artist on the voyage. These are in many cases the very earliest views of the places visited and discovered on the voyage. Flinders' charts in the atlas were of such accuracy that they continued to be issued by the Admiralty for decades and form the basis of all modern charts of Australia. All the charts in the atlas here bear the imprint "W. & G. Nicol Pall Mall… 1814", an important point that identifies them all as being in the correct first issue form." (Hordern House, A unique assemblage of natural history, Item 11, 2019)
Hill, 614; Tooley, pp. 77-9; Wantrup, 67a. For the full text of Volume I and II see https://archive.org/details/voyageTerraAustv1Flin/page/n7/mode/2up and https://archive.org/details/voyageTerraAustv2Flin