ir power to make experiments.

I do not say that the passage from Van Diemen's land to the
Cape of Good Hope, by the westward, is impracticable, as that
remains yet to be tried; but from my own experience of the
prevalence of strong westerly winds across that vast ocean, I am
inclined to think it must be a long and tedious voyage; and at
the same time so very uncertain, that the time for which the
Sirius was victualled, (for four months, and of some articles not
more than two weeks, for the number of men on board; having left
a considerable quantity of our provision for the use of the
settlement,) and the nature of the service she was going upon,
which was no doubt of considerable consequence to the colony, was
not an opportunity for trying such an experiment; as the
consequence of a disappointment would have been, that I must have
returned again to Port Jackson for a fresh supply of provisions,
and the season for another passage would have been too far
advanced. I therefore determined, judging from the experience of
those who had before made the eastern passage, to pass to the
southward of New Zealand and round Cape Horn.

We stood off to the eastward, determined as early as possible
to get an offing of fifty or sixty leagues; the wind continued to
the southward, with the same hazy and squally weather, until the
5th, when it shifted to south-south-east; by this time we were
about 70 leagues from the coast, which enabled us to tack and
stand to the south-west: with this change of wind from the
south-west to the south-east quarter, the same squally and
unsettled weather continued. The ship upon the larboard tack made
much more water than on the starboard, so much as to render it
necessary to pump her every two hours, to prevent too long a
spell; she made in general from ten to twelve inches in two
hours.

There was reason to conjecture, from this difference on the
opposite tacks, that the leak was somewhere about the starboard
bow, and near the surface of the water, and if it proved so, I
had a hope that we might, the first moderate weather, with smooth
water, be able to come at and stop it. I was the more sanguine in
this expectation, as the carpenter, in a few days after,
discovered it to be under the after part of the fore-channel, a
little below the surface of the water; and seemed to think it
proceeded from one of the butt-bolts being corroded by the
copper, which I now understood had never been taken off sinc