sides when they separated, Bass to continue his homeward
voyage, the hapless victims of a desperate attempt to escape to face the
long tramp over five hundred miles of wild and trackless country, with
the prospect of a prolongation of their term of servitude should they
ever reach Sydney. "The difficulties of the country and the possibility
of meeting hostile natives are considerations which will occasion doubts
of their ever being able to reach us," wrote Hunter in a despatch
reporting the matter to the Secretary of State. It does not appear that
one of the five was even seen again.* (* What some convicts dared and
endured in the effort to escape, is shown in the following very
interesting paragraph, printed in a London newspaper of May 30th, 1797:
"The female convict who made her escape from Botany Bay, and suffered the
greatest hardships during a voyage of three thousand leagues [presumably
she was a stowaway] and who was afterwards retaken and condemned to
death, has been pardoned and released from Newgate. In the story of this
woman there is something extremely singular. A gentleman of high rank in
the Army visited her in Newgate, heard the details of her life, and for
that time departed. The next day he returned, and told the gentleman who
keeps the prison that he had procured her pardon, at the same time
requesting that she should not be apprized of the circumstances. The next
day he returned with his carriage, and took off the poor woman, who
almost expired with gratitude.")

To return to the discovery cruise: on January 5th, at seven in the
evening, Bass's whaleboat turned into Westernport, between the bold
granite headland of Cape Wollamai, on Phillip Island, and Point Griffith
on the mainland. The discovery of this port, now the seat of a naval base
for the Commonwealth, was a splendid crown to a remarkable voyage. "I
have named the place," Bass wrote, "from its relative situation to every
other known harbour on the coast, Western Port. It is a large sheet of
water, branching out into two arms, which end in wide flats of several
miles in extent, and it was not until we had been here some days that we
found it to be formed by an island, and to have two outlets to the sea,
an eastern and western passage."

Twelve days were spent in the harbour. The weather was bad; and to this
cause in the main we may attribute the paucity of the observations made,
and the defective account given of the port itself. It contains