untain countries do, but the inhabitants
of the plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains.
The Dutch painters are perfectly contented with their flat fields and
pollards: Rubens, though he had seen the Alps, usually composes his
landscapes of a hay-field or two, plenty of pollards and willows, a
distant spire, a Dutch house with a mast about it, a windmill and a
ditch...So Shakspere never speaks of mountains with the slightest joy,
but only of lowland flowers, flat fields, and Warwickshire streams."
Ruskin's citation of the Lincolnshire farmer in Alton Locke is apt, with
his dislike of "Darned ups and downs o'hills, to shake a body's victuals
out of his inwards.")

The naming of Mounts Heemskirk and Zeehan, the latter since become a
mineral centre of vast wealth, were the most noteworthy events of the run
down the western coast. They were named by Flinders after the two ships
of Tasman, as he took them to be the two mountains seen by that navigator
on his discovery of Van Diemen's Land in 1642.

The Derwent, whose estuary is the port of Hobart, was entered on December
21. Bass's report on the fertility of the soil led to the choice of this
locality for a settlement four years later.

On the last day of the year the return voyage was commenced, and on
January 1st, 1799, the Norfolk was making for Port Jackson with her prow
set north-easterly. The winds were unfavourable, and prevented Flinders
from keeping close inshore, as he would have liked to do in order to make
a survey. But the prescribed period of absence having expired, and the
provisions being nearly exhausted, it was necessary to make as much haste
as possible. On January 8th the Babel Isles were marked down, and named
"because of the confusion of noises made by the geese, shags, penguins,
gulls, and sooty petrels." Anyone who has camped near a rookery of sooty
petrels is aware that they are quite capable of maintaining a
sufficiently "babelish confusion"--the phrase is Camden's--without any
aid from other fowls.

A little later in the month (January 12) the Norfolk sailed into harbour,
and was anchored alongside the Reliance. "To the strait which had been
the great object of research," wrote Flinders, "and whose discovery was
now completed, Governor Hunter gave at my recommendation the name of Bass
Strait. This was no more than a just tribute to my worthy friend and
companion for the extreme dangers and fatigues he had undergone in f