Hordern House continues their excellent service in the publication of early colonial history by releasing Robert Purdie’s Narrative of the Wreck of HMS Porpoise hot on the heels of Elizabeth Ellis’s book on The Sydney Punchbowl in the Mitchell Library. Here the subject is a first-hand description of the foundering of HMS Porpoise, wrecked on 17 August 1803 together with HMS Cato on the then unchartered Great Barrier Reef, when returning Matthew Flinders to London with his first batch of precious surveying charts.