A Great Explorer
George Bass : 1771-1803. By Keith Macrae Bowden. (Oxford University Press. 21s.) IN 1795, when George Bass reached Sydney as ship's surgeon in H.M.S. ' Reliance,' the penal settlement, founded seven years earlier, was still hemmed in between the Blue Mountains and the sea. Those mountains were to remain a barrier until 1813 when Gregory Blaxland crossed the range and, as Ernest Scott has said, " ended the convict system by breaking down the prison In the meantime, however, Bass—after one unsuccessful attempt to cross the mountains—had broadened the horizon of the settlement by voyages of exploration which revealed the scope for non-penal settlements in other parts of south-eastern Australia.
Bass had arrived in Sydney, so he wrote later, " with the professed intention of exploring more of the country than any of my predecessors in the colony." This intention had been developing in his mind since, as a youth in Lincolnshire, he had read Captain Cook's Voyage Round the World, but his mother had wanted him to be a doctor, and he had met her and his own wishes only by becoming—in 1789 at the age of eighteen—a surgeon's mate in the Royal Navy. Although serving as a doctor, Bass soon made himself a first-class seaman and a skilled navigator, and, on being posted to a ship bound for Sydney, took with him from the Thames " a little boat of about eight feet keel," appropriately named the Tom Thumb.' During Ole voyage Bass had the good fortune to meet two men who could materially aid his ambitions—Captain Hunter, the governor-elect of New South Wales, and Matthew Flinders, master's mate in the Reliance.'
With Hunter's encouragement Bass and Flinders were soon venturing south from Sydney in the Tom Thumb,' but the voyage which left Bass's name oh the world's maps was made in an open whaleboat in 1798 almost as far as the future site of Melbourne. Flinders did not accompany Bass on this occasion, but he wrote later : " A voyage undertaken for discovery in an open boat, and in which six hundred miles of coast, mostly in a boisterous climate, was explored, has not, perhaps, its equal in the annals of maritime history. ' On the charts of the time Van Diemen's Land—the present Tasmania—was shown as part of Australia, but Bass returned from this • daring voyage convinced of the existence of the strait, which now bears his name, between the mainland and Van Diemen's Land. Later that year Bass and Flinders—in the 25-ton sloop Norfolk '— put this question beyond dispute by sailing right round Tasmania. As a result of this discovery the voyage from England to Sydney was shortened by a week, but, more important, the detailed reports Which Bass—an ardent naturalist—made on the soil, vegetation and wild life of Van Diemen's Land led directly to its settlement as a branch of the original colony.
Bass's adventurous life ended in 1803, when his ship was lost en route for South America, but already he had ensured that the bounds of settlement would extend beyond New South Wales. Bass was, as his great friend Flinders wrote, " a man whose ardour for discovery, was not to be repressed by any obstacles nor deterred by any danger,' a man-'-to quote another contemporary opinion—whose " very appearance bespoke commanding energy," but in this book he does not really come alive. We are given a clear picture of his varied activities—as ship's surgeon, explorer, naturalist and merchant adventurer—but we are not left with a sharp impression of the man. This might have been remedied if more use had been made of quota- tions from Bass's own journals, and if we had been told more of the relationship between Bass and Flinders which Dr;Bowden describes as " a sort of David and Jonathan alliance." The explanation may be that Dr. Bowden is an analytical scholar rather than a biographer who can bring a personality to life in the setting of his age, but he
has performed a useful purpose in collecting all that is known of the explorer who was, as he says, " one of the bravest and most virile men who grace the pages of Australian geographical discovery."
CHESTER WILMOT.
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