[* Afterwards captain of the Junon.  He was mortally wounded, whilst bravely defending his Majesty’s frigate against a vastly superior force; and died at Guadaloupe.]

BASS. 1797.

In December, Mr. GEORGE BASS obtained leave to make an expedition to the southward; and he was furnished with a fine whale boat and six weeks provisions by the governor, and a crew of six seamen from the ships.  He sailed Dec. 3., in the evening; but foul and strong winds forced him into Port Hacking and Watta-Mowlee.  On the 5th, in latitude 34 deg. 38’, he was obliged to stop in a small bight of the coast, a little south of Alowrie.  The points of land there are basaltic; and on looking round amongst the burnt rocks scattered over a hollowed circular space behind the shore, Mr. Bass found a hole of twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter; into which the sea washed up by a subterraneous passage.

Dec. 6., he passed a long sloping projection which I have called Point Bass, lying about three leagues south of Alowrie.  Beyond this point, the coast forms a sandy bay of four or five leagues in length, containing two small inlets; and the southernmost being accessible to the boat, Mr. Bass went in and stopped three days.  This little place was found to deserve no better name than Shoals Haven.  The entrance is mostly choaked up by sand, and the inner part with banks of sand and mud; there is, however, a small channel sufficiently deep for boats.  The latitude was made to be 34 deg. 52’ south; the sloping Point Bass, to the northward, bore N. 12 deg.  E., and a steep head at the southern extremity of the bay, S. 35 deg.  E. The tide was found to rise seven or eight feet, and the time of high water to be about eight hours and a half after the moon passed over the meridian.

The great chain of high land, called the Blue Mountains, by which the colony at Port Jackson is prevented from extending itself to the west, appeared to Mr. Bass to terminate here, near the sea coast.  The base of this southern extremity of the chain, he judged to extend twenty-five or thirty miles, in a south-western direction from Point Bass; after which it turns north-westward.  In the direction of west from Shoals Haven, and in all the space to the south of that line, was an extensive, flat country, where a party desirous of penetrating into the interior might reasonably hope to avoid those impediments which, at the back of Port Jackson., have constantly proved insurmountable.

In an excursion from the boat towards the southern end of the mountains, Mr. Bass fell in with a considerable stream, which he traced down to the shore, about three miles north of Shoals’ Haven:  this is the first inlet of the long bay, which had been observed from the sea, with a bar running across the entrance.  The soil on the southern bank of this stream he compared, for richness, to the banks of the Hawkesbury; and attributes