George Bass - Marriage and Trading

Marriage and Trading

On 8 October 1800, George married Elizabeth Waterhouse at St. James Church, Westminster. She was the sister of Henry Waterhouse, Bass's former shipmate, and captain of the Reliance. Within three months he set sail again, and though he wrote her affectionate letters, such was his fate that he did not return.

Bass and a syndicate of friends had invested some £10,000 in the copper-sheathed brig the Venus, and a cargo of general goods to transport and sell in Port Jackson. Bass was the owner-manager and set sail in early 1801. (Among his influential friends and key business associates in the Antipodes was the principal surgeon of the satellite British colony on Norfolk Island, Thomas Jamison, who was subsequently appointed Surgeon-General of New South Wales.)

On passing through Bass Strait on his 1801 voyage he recorded it simply as Bass Strait, like any other geographical feature. It seems, as Flinders' biographer Ernest Scott observed, that Bass's natural modesty meant he felt no need to say "discovered by me" or "named after me".

On arrival Bass found the colony awash with goods and he was unable to sell his cargo. Governor King was operating on a strict programme of economy and would not take the goods into the government store, even at a 50% discount. What King did though was contract with Bass to ship salt pork from Tahiti. Food was scarce in Sydney at that time and prices were being driven up, yet pigs were plentiful in the Society Islands and King could contract with Bass at 6 pence a pound where he'd been paying a shilling (12 pence) previously. The arrangement suited King's thrift, and was profitable for Bass. With his partner Charles Bishop Bass sailed from Sydney in the Venus for Dusky Sound in New Zealand where they spent 14 days stripping iron from the wreck of Captain Brampton's old ship the Endeavour. This was made into axes which were used to trade for the pork in Tahiti before returning with the latter to Sydney by November 1802.

In January 1803 Bass applied to King for a fishing monopoly extending from a line bisecting the lower South Island of New Zealand from Dusky Sound to Otago Harbour - now the site of the city of Dunedin - and including all the lands and seas to the south, notably the Antipodes Islands, probably on the basis of information from his brother-in-law Waterhouse, the discoverer of the Antipodes archipelago. He expected much from it, but before he heard it had been declined he sailed south from Sydney never to return. Bass and Flinders were both operating out of Sydney during these times, but their stays there didn't coincide.