Flinders finally returned to England in October 1810. He was in poor health but immediately resumed work preparing "A Voyage to Terra Australis" and his atlas of maps for publication.

 The lengthy full title of this book, which was first published in London in July 1814, was given, as was common at the time, a synoptic description: 

"A Voyage to Terra Australis: undertaken for the purpose of completing the discovery of that vast country, and prosecuted in the years 1801, 1802, and 1803 in His Majesty's ship the Investigator, and subsequently in the armed vessel Porpoise and Cumberland Schooner. With an account of the shipwreck of the Porpoise, arrival of the Cumberland at Mauritius, and imprisonment of the commander during six years and a half in that island ". 

Today, original copies of the Atlas to Flinders' Voyage to Terra Australis are held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney as a portfolio that accompanied the book and included engravings of 16 maps, four plates of views and ten plates of Australian flora. 

Flinders' map of Terra Australis or Australia (the two parts of the double name of his 1804 manuscript reversed) was first published in January 1814 and the remaining maps were published before his atlas and book.

Flinders had wanted to refer to 'Australia' in the title, and although initially it was advised against it, the British Admiralty agreed in 1824 that the continent should be officially called Australia.

Flinders died, aged 40, on 19 July 1814 from kidney disease, at his London home at 14 London Street, later renamed Maple Street and now the site of the BT Tower. This was on the day after the book and atlas was published; Flinders never saw the completed work (as he was unconscious by that time), but his wife arranged the volumes on his bed covers so that he could touch them.