Archaeologists and construction workers are teaming up to unearth historic relics
Workers exhume rows of graves near London’s Euston Station, the terminus of a new train line. (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images/)Matthew Flinders is barely 40, but he looks 70. His once dark hair gleams white, his already slight frame skeletal. As a captain in the British Royal Navy, he’s survived shipwreck, imprisonment, and scurvy, but this kidney infection will do him in. Facing death, he finishes writing a book that will change the world as Europeans know it. Flinders completed the first circumnavigation of the “Terra Australis Incognita,” or “Unknown South Land,” in 1803. A decade later, he compiles his writings, maps, charts, and drawings of the rugged coasts, extensive reefs, fertile slopes, unusual wildlife, and other features of the faraway continent that he suggests naming “Australia.”His wife places a copy of the freshly printed book, A Voyage to Terra Australis, in his hands as he lies unconscious in their...