"buttoned clothes," after being lost for hours, he was found in the middle of one of the sea marshes, his pockets stuffed with pebbles tracing the runlets of water, "wanting to know where they came from." Being desirous of entering the navy, he taught himself navigation from "Euclid" and Robertson's "Elements," without the aid of a master. In 1793, at the age of sixteen, he presented himself as a volunteer on board the Scipio, Captain (afterwards Admiral) Pasley, by whom he was placed on the quarter-deck, and at the instance of that commander joined the Providence, Captain Bligh (afterwards so infamous), engaged to carry bread-fruit trees to the West Indies. In this voyage he was entrusted with the charge of the chronometer, and took his first lesson in the construction of charts.
On his return in the latter part of 1793, he joined the Bellerophon, seventy-four, bearing the broad pendant of Sir Thomas Pasley, to whom he acted as aide-de-camp in Lord Howe's memorable victory of the 1st June, 1794. An account of this action, with diagrams of the position of the two fleets at three several periods of the day, drawn up by Flinders with neatness, clearness, and minuteness, for which all his MSS. are remarkable, are still in the possession of his surviving daughter. From the Bellerophon he followed one of his officers, who took the command of the Reliance, ordered to convey Governor Hunter to New South Wales, and met in George Bass a kindred spirit.
When they arrived in the colony, seven years after the axes of the "First Fleet" rang in the forests of Sydney Cove, little had been done to work out in detail the investigations made previous to the landing in Botany Bay. "Jervis Bay, indicated, but not named, by him, had been entered by Lieutenant Bowen, and Port Stephen had been examined; but the intermediate portions of the coast, both north and south, were little further known than from Captain Cook's general chart; and none of the more distant openings, marked but not explored by that celebrated navigator, had been seen."
The feelings of the colonists seem to have been expressed in a touch of nature which escapes Collins in a note to his heavy, grandiloquent History of New South Wales:—
"In many of these arms of Port Jackson, when sitting with my companions at my ease in a boat, I have been struck with horror at the bare idea of being lost in them, as, from the great similarity of one cove to another, the recollection would he bewildered in attempting to determine any relative situation. Insanity would accelerate the miserable end that must ensue."
Within a month after their arrival in Port Jackson, in 1795, Bass
