On December 10th the boat entered Jervis Bay, and on the 18th Bass discovered Barmouth Creek (probably the mouth of the Bega River), "the prettiest little model of a harbour we had ever seen." Were it not for the shallowness of the bar, he considered that the opening would be "a complete harbour for small craft;" but as things were, "a small boat even must watch her times for going in." On the 19th, at seven o'clock in the morning, Twofold Bay was discovered. Bass sailed round it, made a sketch of it, and put to sea again, thinking it better to leave the place for further examination on the return voyage, and to take advantage of the fair wind for the southward course. He considered the nautical advantages of the harbour—to become in later years a rather important centre for whaling—superior to those of any other anchorage entered during the voyage. A landmark was indicated by him with a quaint touch: "It may be known by a red point on the south side, of the peculiar bluish hue of a drunkard's nose." On the following day at about eleven o'clock in the morning he rounded Cape Howe, and commenced his westerly run. He was now nearing a totally new stretch of coast.
From the 22nd to the 30th bad weather was experienced. A gale blew south-west by west, full in their teeth. The situation must have been uncomfortable in the extreme, for the boat was now entering the Strait. The heavy seas that roll under the lash of a south-west gale in that quarter do not make for the felicity of those who face them on a well-found modern steamer. For the seven Englishmen in an open boat, groping along a strange coast, the ordeal was severe. But no doubt they wished each other a merry Christmas, in quite the traditional English way, and with hearty good 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 untutored savages. If ever boat breasted the "foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," it was this, and if ever its occupants realised the complete strangeness of their situation and their utter aloofness from the tracks of their fellowmen, it must have been on this cloudless moonlit summer night. There was hardly a stretch of the world's waters, at all events in any habitable zone, where they could have been farther away from all that they remembered with affection and hoped to see again. About half an hour before midnight a haze dimmed the distinctness of the shore, and at midnight it had thickened so that they could scarcely see land at all. But they crept along in their course, "vast flights of petrels and other birds flying about us," the watch peering into the mist, the rest wrapped in their blankets sleeping, while the stars shone down on them from a brilliant steel-blue sky, and the Cross wheeled high above the southern horizon.
Cook, on his Endeavour voyage in 1770, first sighted the Australian coast at Point Hicks, called Cape Everard on many current maps. His second officer, Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, at six in the morning of April 20, "saw ye land making high," and Cook "named it Point Hicks because Lieutenant Hicks was the first who discovered this land." Point Hicks is a projection which falls away landward from a peak, backed by a sandy conical hill, but Bass passed it without observing it. The thick haze which he mentions may have obscured the outline. At all events, by dusk on January 1st he found that he had filled up the hitherto unexplored space between Point Hicks "a point we could not at all distinguish from the rest of the beach," and the high hummocky land further west, which he believed to be that sighted by Captain Tobias Furneaux in 1773. It is, however, to be observed that Flinders pointed out that all Bass's reckonings after December 31st were ten miles out. "It is no matter of surprise," wrote his friend indicating an error, "if observations taken from an open boat in a high sea should differ ten miles from the truth; but I judge that Mr. Bass's quadrant must have received some injury during the night of the 31st, for a similar error appears to pervade all the future observations, even those taken under favourable circumstances." The missing of Point Hicks, therefore, apart from the thick haze, is not difficult to understand.
On Tuesday, January 2nd, Bass reached the most southerly point in the continent of Australia, the extremity of Wilson's Promontory. The bold outlines were sighted at seven o'clock in the morning. "We were surprised by the sight of high hummocky land right ahead, and at a considerable distance." Bass called it Furneaux Land in his diary, in the belief that a portion of the great granite peninsula had been seen by the captain of the Adventure in 1773. Furneaux' name is still attached to the group of islands divided by Banks' Strait from the north-east corner of Tasmania. But the name which Bass gave to the Promontory was not retained. It is not likely that Furneaux ever saw land so far west. "It cannot be the same, as Mr. Bass was afterwards convinced," wrote Flinders. Governor Hunter, "at our recommendation," named it Wilson's Promontory, "in compliment to my friend Thomas Wilson, Esq., of London." It has been stated that the name was given to commemorate William Wilson, one of the whaleboat crew, who "jumped ashore first."* (* Ida Lee, The Coming of the British to Australia, London 1906 page 51.) Nobody "jumped ashore first" on the westward voyage, when the discovery was made, because, as Bass twice mentions in his diary, "we could not land." Doubly inaccurate is the statement of another writer that "the promontory was seen and named by Grant in 1800 after Admiral Wilson."* (* Blair, Cyclopaedia of Australia, 748.) Grant himself, on his chart of Bass Strait, marked down the promontory as "accurately surveyed by Matthew Flinders, which he calls Wilson's Promontory," and on page 78 of his Narrative wrote that it was named by Bass. The truth is, as related above, that it was named by Hunter on the recommendation of Bass and Flinders; and the two superfluous Wilsons have no proper place in the story. The Thomas Wilson whose name was thus given to one of the principal features of the Australian coast—a form of memorial far more enduring than "storied urn or animated bust"—is believed to have been a London merchant, engaged partly in the Australian trade. Nothing more definite is known about him. He was as one who "grew immortal in his own despight." Of the Promontory itself Bass wrote—and the words are exceedingly apt—that it was "well worthy of being the boundary point of a large strait, and a corner stone of this great island New Holland."
Bass found the neighbourhood of the Promontory to be the home of vast numbers of petrels, gulls and other birds, as is still the case, and he remarked upon the seals observed upon neighbouring rocks, with "a remarkably long tapering neck and sharp pointed head." They were the ordinary Bass Strait seal, once exceedingly plentiful, and still to be found on some of the islands, but unfortunately much fewer in numbers now. The pupping time was passed when Bass sailed through, and many of the females had gone to sea, as is their habit. This cause of depletion accounts for his remark on his return voyage that the number was "by no means equal to what we had been led to expect." But, he added, "from the quantity I saw I have every reason to believe that a speculation on a small scale might be carried on with advantage."
Foul winds and heavy breaking seas were experienced while the boat was nearing the Promontory. To make matters worse, leaks were causing anxiety. Water was gushing in pretty freely near the water-line aft. The crew had frequently remarked in the course of the morning of January 3rd how much looser the boat had become during the last few days. Her planks had received no ordinary battering. It had been Bass's intention to strike for the northern coast of Van Diemen's Land, which he supposed to be at no very great distance. He may at this time have been under the impression that he was in a deep gulf. As a matter of fact, the nearest point southward that he could have reached was 130 miles distant. Anxiety about the condition of the boat made him resolve to continue his coasting cruise westward. Water rushed in fast through the boat's side, there was risk of a plank starting, and ploughing through a hollow, irregular sea, the explorers were, as Flinders reviewing the adventure wrote, "in the greatest danger." Bass's record of his night of peril is characteristically terse: "we had a bad night of it, but the excellent qualities of the boat brought us through." He says nothing of his own careful steering and sleepless vigilance.
It was on the evening of the third day, January 3rd, that an incident occurred to which, curiously enough, Bass made no allusion in his diary, presumably because it did not concern the actual work of navigation and discovery, but which throws a dash of tragic colour into the story of his adventure. The boat having returned to the coast of what was supposed to be Furneaux Land, was running along "in whichever way the land might trend, for the state of the boat did not seem to allow of our quitting the shore with propriety." The coast line was being scanned for a place of shelter, when smoke was observed curling up from an island not far from the Promontory. At first it was thought that the smoke arose from a fire lighted by aboriginals, but it was discovered, to the amazement of Bass and his crew, that the island was occupied by a party of white men. They were escaped convicts. The tale they had to tell was one of a wild dash for liberty, treachery by confederates, and abandonment to the imminent danger of starvation.