The Important Fact To Be Noticed Is That Le Geographe Had Slipped Past Port Phillip Without Observing The Entrance, And That Her Captain Was At This Time Entirely Ignorant Of The Existence Of The Harbour Which Has Since Become The Seat Of One Of The Greatest Cities In The Southern Hemisphere.

Now this statement, which is sufficiently surprising without the introduction of complicating contradictions, becomes quite mysterious when compared with the accounts given by Lieutenant Louis de Freycinet and Francois Peron, the joint authors of the official history of the French voyage.

It is astonishing in itself, because a vessel sent out on a voyage of exploration would not be expected to overlook so important a feature as Port Phillip. Here was not a small river with a sandbar over its mouth, but an extensive area of land-locked sea, with an opening a mile and a half wide, flanked by rocky head-lands, fronted by usually turbulent waters, at the head of a deep indentation of the coast. The entrance to Port Phillip is not, it must be acknowledged, so easy to perceive from the outside as would appear from a hasty examination of the map. If the reader will take a good atlas in which there is a map of Port Phillip, and will hold the plate in a horizontal position sufficiently below the level of the eye to permit the entrance to be seen ALONG the page, he will look at it very much as it is regarded from a ship at sea.* (* A reduced copy of the Admiralty chart of the entrance (1907) is prefixed to this chapter.

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