THE SUCCESSORS OF COOK 497 



landmarks and correcting the detail. Rounding " the 

 rugged and determined front " which the extremity 

 of Van Diemen's Land presents to the icy regions of 

 the South Pole," he came on the I4th of December to 

 Storm Bay. 



He was now in a region that had been visited by several storm Bay. 

 navigators. Tasman had surveyed the coast, and had 

 given names to its prominent features. Furneaux and 

 Cook had mistaken Tasman's landmarks in a way that 

 produced permanent geographic confusion. In 1792 and 

 1793 the French navigator Dentrecasteaux had twice 

 made long visits to the Channel which still bears his name ; 

 had explored with enthusiastic praise its fertile and beautiful 

 shores ; had explored to use terms of modern geography 

 Norfolk Bay and Frederick Henry Bay ; and had sailed 

 twenty miles up the river Derwent, which he called the 

 River of the North, an unhappy name, comments Flinders, 

 for a river in the far South. The hydrographer, Beaupre, 

 had made charts w r hich, wrote Flinders at a later date, 

 " contain some of the finest specimens of marine surveying 

 perhaps ever made in a new country " ; 1 but those charts 

 were unknown to Flinders when he sailed into Storm 

 Bay. He had, however, a rough chart which had been 

 made by Hayes, a seaman who had been sent in 1794 

 by the East Indian Company to explore the Australasian 

 part of the huge domain subject to their monopoly, and 

 who, in ignorance of the French discoveries, had made 

 these discoveries again, and had given them English names. 



Thus in the lovely region of Hobart there were no big Van 

 things left for Flinders to discover. His main business LamHs less 

 was to make exact geographic reports, and to endeavour poor than 



to get the confusion of geographic names into intelligible m 



order ; the latter task proved impracticable, and confusion 

 became permanent. 2 Bass, meanwhile, explored with his 



1 Flinders, p. xciii. ; Walker, p. 8. 



2 E.g. " As I apprehend this is the place that Tasman called Frederick 

 Henry Bay more than a century ago, I have prefixed that name to it 

 in the chart " (Historical Records of N.S.W., vol. iii. p. 805) a mistake 

 which confirmed once more Furneaux's mistake, and placed on the West 

 side of Tasman's peninsula a Bay which Tasman had placed on the East, 



W.A, 21 



