d feeling, on the 25th.

On the last day of the year, in more moderate weather, the boat was
coasting the Ninety Mile Beach, behind the sandy fringe of which lay the
fat pastures of eastern Gippsland. The country did not look very
promising to Bass from the sea, and he minuted his impressions in a few
words: "low beaches at the bottom of heights of no great depth, lying
between rocky projecting points; in the back lay some short ridges of
lumpy irregular hills at a little distance from the sea."

Nowhere in his diary did Bass seize upon any picturesque features of
scenery, though they are not lacking in the region that he traversed. If
he was moved by a sense of the oppressiveness of vast, silent solitudes,
or by any sensation of strangeness at feeling his way along a coast
hitherto unexplored, the emotion finds scarcely any reflection in his
record. Hard facts, dates, times, positions, and curt memoranda, were the
sole concern of the diarist. He did not even mention a pathetic, almost
tragic, incident of the voyage, to which reference will presently be
made. It did not concern the actual exploratory part of his work, and so
he passed it by. The one note signifying an appreciation of the
singularity of the position is conveyed in the terse words: "Sunday 31st,
a.m. Daylight, got out and steered along to the southward, in anxious
expectation, being now nearly come upon an hitherto unknown part of the
coast."

But men are emotional beings after all, and an entry for "January 1st,
1798" (really the evening of December 31), bare of the human touch as it
is, brings the situation of Bass and his crew vividly before the eye of
the reader. The dramatic force of it must have been keenly realised by
them. At night there was "bright moonlight, the sky without a cloud." A
new year was dawning. The seven Englishmen tossing on the waves in this
solitary part of the globe would not fail to remember that. They were
near enough to the land to see it distinctly; it was "still low and
level." A flood of soft light lay upon it, and rippled silvery over the
sea. They would hear the wash of the rollers that climb that bevelled
shore, and pile upon the water-line creaming leagues of phosphorescent
foam. And at the back lay a land of mystery, almost as tenantless as the
moon herself, but to be the future home of prosperous thousands of the
same race as the men in the whaleboat. To them it was a country of weird
forms, strange animals, and un