History
The gulf was named Spencer's Gulph by explorer Matthew Flinders in 1802, after George John Spencer, the 2nd Earl Spencer, an ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales. The official name is now Spencer Gulf. The gulf was also named Golfe Bonaparte by Nicholas Baudin at roughly the same time as Flinders, but the name did not catch (others, like the Fleurieu Peninsula, did).
The area was first explored on land by Edward John Eyre in 1839 and 1840-41. Settlement of the shores of the Gulf began in the late 1840s.
Read more about this topic: Spencer Gulf
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“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)