ed with only six weeks'
provisions; but with the assistance of occasional supplies of petrels,
fish, seals'-flesh, and a few geese and black swans, and by abstinence,
he had been enabled to prolong his voyage beyond eleven weeks. His ardour
and perseverance were crowned, in despite of the foul winds which so much
opposed him, with a degree of success not to have been anticipated from
such feeble means. In three hundred miles of coast from Port Jackson to
the Ram Head, he added a number of particulars which had escaped Captain
Cook, and will always escape any navigator in a first discovery, unless
he have the time and means of joining a close examination by boats to
what may be seen from the ship.

"Our previous knowledge of the coast scarcely extended beyond the Ram
Head; and there began the harvest in which Mr. Bass was ambitious to
place the first reaping-hook. The new coast was traced three hundred
miles; and instead of trending southward to join itself to Van Diemen's
Land, as Captain Furneaux had supposed, he found it, beyond a certain
point, to take a direction nearly opposite, and to assume the appearance
of being exposed to the buffeting of an open sea. Mr. Bass himself
entertained no doubt of the existence of a wide strait separating Van
Diemen's Land from New South Wales, and he yielded with the greatest
reluctance to the necessity of returning before it was so fully
ascertained as to admit of no doubt in the minds of others. But he had
the satisfaction of placing at the end of his new coast an extensive and
useful harbour, surrounded with a country superior to any other harbour
in the southern parts of New South Wales.

"A voyage especially undertaken for discovery in an open boat, and in
which six hundred miles of coast, mostly in a boisterous climate, was
explored, has not, perhaps, its equal in the annals of maritime history.
The public will award to its high-spirited and able conductor--alas! now
no more--an honourable place in the list of those whose ardour stands
most conspicuous for the promotion of useful knowledge."

Bass would have desired no better recognition than this competent
appraisement of his work by one who, when he wrote these paragraphs, had
himself experienced a full measure of the perils of the sea.

Was Bass at the time of his return aware that he had discovered a strait?
It has been asserted that "it is evident that Bass was not fully
conscious of the great discovery he had made."*