Dates with History Midweeker
The historical joyride for a curious mind
Dates with History Midweeker — Spend a few minutes with me exploring a handful of historical moments, figures and the occasional oddity connected to this week. Some you’ll know. Some you won’t—hopefully! 15th July 2026.
Happy Wednesday!
Let’s go…
Matthew Flinders’ Circumnavigation of ‘Australia’
In 1770, Captain Cook sailed HMS Endeavour up the unmapped eastern edge of New Holland, stopped at a piece of land he named Possession Island, and claimed the entire coastline for King George III. He called it New South Wales.
What Cook hadn’t established was what lay behind that coastline. The western side, New Holland, had been charted by Dutch sailors since the 1600s, but nobody had linked the two coastlines into a single landmass. Someone would have to sail all the way round to prove one way or another.
Matthew Flinders…
…was born in Lincolnshire in 1774. He sailed to Tahiti in 1791 under the captaincy of a survivor of one of the great maritime dramas of the age—Captain William Bligh, of Mutiny on the Bounty notoriety. He then spent the closing years of the 1790s surveying the colony’s coast, proving—with his friend George Bass in 1798–99—that Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) was in fact an island, separated from the mainland by what would be called Bass Strait.
Back home, Flinders had barely enough time to marry his long-time love Ann Chappell in April 1801. Within weeks, the Admiralty would dispatch Matthew to map New Holland’s unknown coast, complete the outline of the landmass, and determine the answer to the question, “Is New Holland, in fact, two landmasses?“
It would be over nine years before the couple saw each other again.
Flinders sailed out of Spithead, near Portsmouth, 225 years ago this Saturday, 18 July 1801, commanding HMS Investigator—a 330-ton former collier refitted for survey work. She was broad-beamed, shallow-drafted and built for hauling coal, not for beauty. But that was exactly what Flinders needed. A ship shaped like a bathtub doesn’t capsize in shallow water—it just sits down.
It turns out charting a coastline is hard, slow work. Flinders ran his main survey from Investigator’s deck, taking bearings on headlands and stitching them together—quick, but blind to anything tucked out of sight.
When an opening looked promising, he would anchor and send small boats in to sound it out in person. Twice on the unmapped southern coast, at Spencer Gulf and Gulf St Vincent in the south, the openings suggested they might be the mouth of straits dividing the continent. Twice, the inlets dried up.
Close by, off the newly named Encounter Bay, Flinders ran into Nicolas Baudin, who was leading France’s own survey of the southern continent from the opposite direction. Two nations, both quietly mapping the same coastline for their own purposes. Instead of trading broadsides, the two men leaned over each other’s charts and compared notes on harbours, headlands and watering holes—like rival estate agents caught showing the same house.
Flinders finally returned to England in late 1810, and after nearly nine years of letters and waiting, Ann was at last able to see the husband she had married in haste back in 1801.
It’s easy to underrate a voyage that ends with a simple ‘no’. Yet somebody had to sail thousands of miles, then row up every gulf that looked promising, to show that this vast southern land was not secretly split in two by a hidden sea.
Flinders did that work tirelessly in a refitted coal ship. He gave the continent its coastline in ink and, rather touchingly, he was also the one who championed the name it still bears today—Australia.
A short break...
No Dates with History next week, but don’t let that stop you from contacting me and sharing your thoughts.
Just drop me an email at steve@dateswithhistory.com and let me know. Thanks, Steve
La Goulue - the cancan girl
Louise Weber was born 160 years ago last Sunday, 12 July 1866, in Clichy-la-Garenne, just outside Paris. She was a laundress’s daughter who had a talent for borrowing her mother’s customers’ dresses and an even better one for finishing their champagne.
By sixteen she was slipping off to Montmartre dance halls; by the early 1890s she was one of the highest-paid performers in Paris—dancing accounted for most of it, courtesanship for the rest, with a blurred line between the two.
Her stage name, La Goulue—’the Glutton‘—came from a knack for emptying customers’ glasses mid-performance, a party trick that occasionally upstaged the dancing itself.
The dancing was the real business. She turned the cancan into something closer to acrobatics—kicks that sent hats flying, a heart embroidered on her underwear for anyone still not paying attention—and became artist Toulouse-Lautrec’s favourite model, fixed forever in posters that would outlast her fame by roughly a century.
In 1895 she walked out on the Moulin Rouge, certain she’d outgrown it. She hadn’t. Her travelling show flopped and her efforts at lion-taming were not the roaring success she had hoped for.
By 1928 she was back in Montmartre, selling peanuts outside the very cabaret she’d once ruled—unrecognised by the crowds who walked past. She died the following year, at sixty-two, the Queen of the cancan reduced to a pavement footnote, her legend living on mostly in posters hanging on other people’s walls.
Question of the Week
Which Dutch artist painted The Night Watch in 1642?
And Finally…
Andrea del Sarto…
…was born in Florence 540 years ago tomorrow, 16 July 1486, the son of a tailor—hence ‘del Sarto‘, or ‘of the tailor‘. He has largely been forgotten by history, which seems a little unfair given what he achieved with a paintbrush.
By his twenties he was the finest painter working in Florence—admittedly helped by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael having left town. His frescoes for the Compagnia dello Scalzo were so precise that admirers nicknamed him ‘Andrea senza errori’—Andrea without errors.
In 1518, Francis I lured him to the French court, where Andrea’s talent went down rather better than his expense account. Entrusted with the king’s money to buy Italian masterpieces, he popped home to Florence—and simply forgot to go back.
Andrea spent the cash on a house instead and never returned. Robert Browning later immortalised the episode in verse, in ‘Andrea del Sarto’, sometimes referred to as ‘The Faultless Painter‘.
In this work, Browning produces one of my favourite lines in poetry. Andrea is talking to his wife, Lucrezia, reflecting on a lifetime of faultless, but ultimately second‑rate, work—technically perfect, but never quite reaching the heaven of Raphael or Michelangelo.
“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”
The fact that historians now suspect the story never happened will not ruin my love of this quote. In fact, I shall ignore them.
Andrea del Sarto died of plague in Florence in September 1530, aged just 44.
Question of the week… answer
Rembrandt.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born 420 years ago today, 15 July 1606, in Leiden, Netherlands, the youngest of at least ten children.
By his twenties, Rembrandt was Amsterdam’s portraitist of choice, charging handsomely to make wealthy merchants look thoughtful and important.
In 1642 he was commissioned to paint a group portrait of a civic militia company—a unit of citizen-soldiers protecting the town. This sort of job was usually delivered as a tidy row of faces, each man having paid for the privilege of being recognisable.
Rembrandt ignored the brief entirely. He gave them drama, shadow, a barking dog, a girl glowing improbably in the gunpowder smoke—and buried several paying customers in the gloom.
The result, later nicknamed The Night Watch, is now considered his greatest masterpiece and the Rijksmuseum’s most notable. The investors lost in the deep shadows were considerably less impressed.
The same year, Rembrandt’s wife Saskia died, and his fortunes began their long slide toward bankruptcy.
He died in Amsterdam in October 1669, out of fashion, his possessions long since auctioned off.
Thank you for joining me. Enjoy the rest of the week!
Steve
CHIEF STORY HUNTER & WRITER
ATTRIBUTIONS
The Night Watch: Rembrandt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
La Goulue: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Map of Australia: Summerdrought, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Statue of Captain Matthew Flinders: Crisco 1492, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
