be taken by storm. Bass's success, as Flinders wrote, "was not
commensurate to the perseverance and labour employed." After fifteen days
of effort, the baffled adventurers confessed themselves beaten, and,
their provisions being exhausted, returned to Sydney.

They had pushed research further than any previous explorers had done,
and had marked down the course of the river Grose as a practical result
of their work. But Bass now believed the mountains to be hopeless; and,
indeed, George Caley, a botanical collector employed by Sir Joseph Banks,
having seven years later made another attempt and met with repulse, did
not hesitate to tell a committee of the House of Commons, which summoned
him to appear as a witness, that the range was impassable. It seemed that
Nature had tumbled down an impenetrable bewilderment of rock, the
hillsides cracking into deep, dark crevices, and the crests of the
mountains showing behind and beyond a massed confusion of crags and
hollows, trackless and untraversable. Governor King declared himself
satisfied that the effort to cross the range was a task "as chimerical as
useless," an opinion strengthened by the fact that, as Allan Cunningham
had related,* the aboriginals known to the settlement were "totally
ignorant of any pass to the interior." (* On "Progress of Interior
Discovery in New South Wales," Journal of the Royal Geographical Society
1832 Volume 2 99.)

It was not, indeed, till 1813 that Gregory Blaxland, with Lieutenant
Lawson and William Charles Wentworth (then a youth), as companions,
succeeded in solving the problem. The story of their steady, persistent,
and desperate struggle being beyond the scope of this biography, it is
sufficient to say that after fifteen days of severe labour, applied with
rare intelligence and bushcraft, they saw beneath them waving
grass-country watered by clear streams, and knew that they had found a