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Rh a boat very much better than "Tom Thumb," but still ludicrously unadapted to the importance of the undertaking. It was an open whale-boat, which was furnished by the governor with a crew of six seamen from the ships, and six weeks' provisions. With the assistance of occasional supplies of petrels, seals' flesh, and a few geese and black swans, and by great economy and abstinence, he was enabled to prolong this voyage beyond eleven weeks. In spite of contrary winds and other obstacles, his ardour and perseverance were crowned with extraordinary success. "A voyage," says his friend Flinders in his narrative, "expressly 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 all the annals of maritime discovery." Such perseverance could not fail at length to attract attention. A sloop was furnished to the discoverers to continue their useful labours, in the course of which Flinders continued the examination of the great strait, now universally known as Bass's Strait, a name which Flinders himself gave to it with the sanction of Governor Hunter, deeming this, as he said, a just tribute to his faithful friend and companion for the dangers and fatigues he had undergone in first entering it in the whale-boat, and to the correct judgment he had formed from various indications of the existence of a wide opening between Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales. Bass had, in fact, with remarkable sagacity, inferred the existence of this strait when running down the eastern coast in an open whaleboat, the heavy sea which rolled in from the westward having satisfied him that such a swell could proceed