nds and shoals, the
situations of which we determined, and it is my intention, if the Navy
Board will permit me, to lay a short account of this northern passage
before the Board, when the discoveries will be particularly mentioned.
No ship that I have heard of having sailed between New Britain and New
Ireland since that passage was discovered by Captain Carteret in
Her Majesty's sloop _Swallow_, I was the more desirous to take that
route.... We passed through the Straits of Macassar and arrived at
Batavia after a tedious and distressing passage of twenty-six weeks."

* A snow differed somewhat slightly from a brig. It had two
masts similar to the fore and mainmasts of a brig or ship,
and, close abaft the mainmast, a topsail mast.

After burying an officer and two seamen at Batavia, Hunter left that
place on October 20th, reached the Cape on the 17th of December, and
was driven to sea again after the loss of two anchors, till the 30th.
So weak and ill were his men from the effects of their stay in the
unhealthy climate of Batavia, that he had to remain at the Cape till the
18th of January, when he again put to sea and sailed for England.

Hunter's brief and precise official account of his voyage discloses
little of the great distress of that thirteen months' passage; but it
shows how the spirit of discovery was in the man; how, in spite of the
care of one hundred and twenty-three people in a 300-ton vessel, and
half rations, he had time and energy enough to think of surveying. One
result of his voyage was his strongly expressed opinion that the proper
route home from Australia was _via_ Cape Horn--now the recognised
homeward route for sailing vessels.

The name of King ought never to be forgotten, for the services of father
and son in Australian waters were very great. King, the elder, came
out with Phillip as second lieutenant of the crazy old _Sirius_. He had
previously served under Phillip in the East Indies, and soon after the
arrival of the first fleet in "Botany Bay," as New South Wales was
then called, he was sent with a detachment of Marines and a number of
convicts to colonise Norfolk Island. His task was a hard one, but he
accomplished it in the face of almost heartbreaking difficulties.

Phillip, finding that his despatches failed to awaken the Home
Government to a sense of the deplorable situation of the colony he
had founded at Port Jackson, determined to send home a man who would
represe