482 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



a success, which, in view of its difficulties, was one of the 

 greatest exploits in the history of navigation. But his 

 map was a first sketch made with very imperfect instru- 

 ments for in 1768, says Flinders, " time-keepers were 

 in their infancy, and he was not furnished with them " l 

 and made also, generally, from a distance, without oppor- 



Torres tunity to examine even the most important features 

 11 ' that were noticed. He had won his way to Torres Strait 

 by a route of such incessant and prodigious dangers that 

 the only service he had rendered to his successors was 

 the knowledge that there was one route which no sensible 

 seaman would ever again sail. 2 He had got through 

 Torres Strait by a passage difficult and dangerous ; but, 

 apart from this one passage, the huge chaos of the Strait 

 remained unexplored. The next British ships that sailed 

 the Strait, under Bligh and Portlock in 1792, took 

 nineteen days to get through ; 3 and the next, under Bampton 

 and Alt in 1793, took seventy- two days ; facts which 

 " deterred all other commanders from following them." 

 " Perhaps," wrote Flinders, " no space of three and a 

 half degrees in length presents more dangers." Yet, 

 if a passage "moderately free from danger" were found, 

 ships might save " five or six weeks of their usual route 



The Gulf, by the North of New Guinea, or the more Eastern Islands." 

 Westward from Cape York, geography rested entirely 

 on very old Dutch authority. There was good evidence 

 that, in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch 

 had carefully explored the Eastern side of the Gulf of 

 Carpentaria to 17 Lat. ; but " it was certain," wrote 

 Flinders, " that those early navigators did not possess 

 the means of fixing the positions and forms of lands with 

 anything like the accuracy of modern science." And 

 the geography of the South and West coasts of the Gulf, 

 of Arnhem Land, and of the Northern Van Diemen's Land, 



1 Flinders, Preface, p. vii. 



2 Wharton, p. xxxi : " a route which no one has ever again followed." 



3 See Ida Lee's Captain Bligh's Second Voyage to the South Sea. 

 The writer also tells the story of Bligh's 3,600 mile row from Tahiti to 

 Timor in the 23-feet long boat of the Bounty, in the course of which he 

 passed through another channel in Torres Strait. 



