name was given to commemorate William Wilson, one of the whaleboat crew, who "jumped ashore first."[1] Nobody "jumped ashore first" on the westward voyage, when the discovery was made, because, as Bass twice mentions in his diary, "we could not land." Doubly inaccurate is the statement of another writer that "the promontory was seen and named by Grant in 1800 after Admiral Wilson."[2] Grant himself, on his chart of Bass Strait, marked down the promontory as "accurately surveyed by Matthew Flinders, which he calls Wilson's Promontory," and on page 78 of his Narrative wrote that it was named by Bass. The truth is, as related above, that it was named by Hunter on the recommendation of Bass and Flinders; and the two superfluous Wilsons have no proper place in the story. The Thomas Wilson whose name was thus given to one of the principal features of the Australian coast—a form of memorial far more enduring than "storied urn or animated bust"—is believed to have been a London merchant, engaged partly in the Australian trade. Nothing more definite is known about him. He was as one who "grew immortal in his own despight." Of the Promontory itself Bass wrote—and the words are exceedingly apt—that it was "well worthy of being the boundary point of a large strait, and a corner stone of this great island New Holland."
Bass found the neighbourhood of the Promontory to be the home of vast numbers of petrels, gulls and other birds, as is still the case, and he remarked upon the seals observed upon neighbouring rocks, with "a remarkably long tapering neck and sharp pointed head." They were the ordinary Bass Strait seal, once exceedingly plentiful, and still to be found on some of the
- ↑ The Coming of the British to Australia, by Ida Lee (London, 1906) p. 51.
- ↑ Blair, Cyclopaedia of Australia, 748.
