near enough to the land to see it distinctly; it was "still low and
level." A flood of soft light lay upon it, and rippled silvery over the
sea. They would hear the wash of the rollers that climb that bevelled
shore, and pile upon the water-line creaming leagues of phosphorescent
foam. And at the back lay a land of mystery, almost as tenantless as the
moon herself, but to be the future home of prosperous thousands of the
same race as the men in the whaleboat. To them it was a country of weird
forms, strange animals, and untutored savages. If ever boat breasted the
"foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," it was this, and if ever
its occupants realised the complete strangeness of their situation and
their utter aloofness from the tracks of their fellowmen, it must have
been on this cloudless moonlit summer night. There was hardly a stretch
of the world's waters, at all events in any habitable zone, where they
could have been farther away from all that they remembered with affection
and hoped to see again. About half an hour before midnight a haze dimmed
the distinctness of the shore, and at midnight it had thickened so that
they could scarcely see land at all. But they crept along in their
course, "vast flights of petrels and other birds flying about us," the
watch peering into the mist, the rest wrapped in their blankets sleeping,
while the stars shone down on them from a brilliant steel-blue sky, and
the Cross wheeled high above the southern horizon.

Cook, on his Endeavour voyage in 1770, first sighted the Australian coast
at Point Hicks, called Cape Everard on many current maps. His second
officer, Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, at six in the morning of April 20,
"saw ye land making high," and Cook "named it Point Hicks because
Lieutenant Hicks was the first who discovered this land." Point Hicks is
a projection which falls away landward from a peak, backed by a sandy
conical hill, but Bass passed it without observing it. The thick haze
which he mentions may have obscured the outline. At all events, by dusk