Here is a family record! Three generations, all naval officers, and all men who have taken an active share in the founding and growth of Greater Britain; and yet not one man in a thousand in Australia, much less in England, has probably the remotest idea of the services rendered to the Empire by this family.
The fourth and last naval Governor, Bligh, is more often remembered in connection with the _Bounty_ mutiny than for his governorship of New South Wales. He was deposed by the military in 1808, for his action in endeavouring to suppress the improper traffic in rum which was being carried on by the officers of the New South Wales Regiment. This second mutiny, of which he was the victim, certainly cannot be blamed against the honesty of his administration; and the assertion, so often repeated, that he hid himself under his bed when the mutinous soldiers--who had been well primed with rum by their officers--marched to Government House, can best be answered by the statement that Nelson publicly thanked him for his skill and gallantry at Copenhagen, and by the heroism which he showed in the most remarkable boat voyage in history. He may have been the most tyrannical and overbearing naval officer that ever entered the service, but he was not the man to hide himself under a bed.
There were other naval officers of the early Australian days whose services were no less valuable to the infant colony. Think of the men associated with this time, and of the names famous in history, which are in some way linked with Australia. Dampier, Cook, La Pérouse, Bligh, Edwards and the _Pandora_, Vancouver, Flinders, Bass--all these are familiar to the world, and there are others in plenty; for example, Grant, who in his vessel, the brig _Lady Nelson_, did such work in Australian waters as, if performed nowadays say in Africa, would have been recorded in hundreds of newspaper interviews, many process-work pictures and a 21s. book with cheap editions!
What a story is that of Bass and Flinders! Such noble, disinterested courage! Such splendid service to English colonisation, and such a sad ending to it all.
Bass and Flinders, in their tiny open boat, the _Tom Thumb_, and in the sloop _Norfolk_, dotting the blank map of Australia with the names of their discoveries--it is not necessary surely to remind the reader that Bass began, and together the two men completed, the discovery and passage of the straits between Van Dieman's Land and the main continent. Bass surveyed something like six hundred miles of the Australian coast in a whaleboat with a crew of six men! And one _cannot_ summarise Flinders' work in the _Norfolk_ and in the _Investigator_ before the old ship was condemned and converted into a hulk to rot in Sydney Harbour.