tutored 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 poi