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.[1]
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 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 formed by an island, and to have two outlets to the sea, an eastern and western passage."
Twelve days were spend in the harbour. The weather was bad; and to this cause in the main we may
- ↑ 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."
