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80
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DISCOVERY OP BASS'S STRAITS.
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authorizing
proper persons to hold the said courts. At the conclusion of the
ceremony three volleys were fired by the troops under arms, and the
young nation—born, it is true, of somewhat questionable parentage—was
launched on its future career, though no one then present dreamed of
the rapidity of its growth, or the self-contained wealth—industrial and
natural—which has contributed, and is contributing, to raise it as one
of the greatest monuments of Anglo-Saxon enterprise.
After
the establishment of the English colony, the coasts which had been
unvisited by Englishmen were diligently explored ; and one of the
first fruits of this was the discovery, in 1798, by Bass and Flinders,
of the strait which separates Van Diemen's Land from the mainland of
Australia, the strait being called by the name of the former. As this
discovery arose from perhaps one of the most arduous enterprises ever
undertaken and accomplished, our resume, of Australian discovery would be incomplete without a narration of the circumstances.
Mr. Bass was the surgeon of the Reliance, and Lieutenant— afterwards Captain—Flinders started with him on a survey of the iron-bound coast of Australia, in a boat only eight feet long ! to which had been given the appropriate name of Tom Thumb. The
crew consisted of these two gentlemen and a boy only. Finding their
little craft somewhat too' circumscribed for active operations, Bass
contrived to procure a whale boat, six men, and six weeks'
provisions;—in this cockle-shell, in tempestuous weather, he explored
the coast for 600 miles, at length entering what Furneaux and others,
as we have seen, considered a deep bay. He had not gone far before the
outline of the coast convinced him that there was a strait between "Van
Diemen's Land and New South Wales. To explore this fully with his
inadequate means was out of the question. He therefore retraced his
perilous voyage to Sydney, when Governor Hunter was induced to verify
his observations, by sending Lieutenant Flinders and himself in the
colonial schooner Norfolk, of only twenty-five tons burthen. With this little
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