For the seven Englishmen in an open boat, groping along a strange coast, the ordeal was severe.

But no doubt they wished each other a merry Christmas, in quite the traditional English way, and with hearty good feeling, on the 25th.
On the last day of the year, in more moderate weather, the boat was coasting the Ninety Mile Beach, behind the sandy fringe of which lay the fat pastures of eastern Gippsland.

The country did not look very promising to Bass from the sea, and he minuted his impressions in a few words: "low beaches at the bottom of heights of no great depth, lying between rocky projecting points; in the back lay some short ridges of lumpy irregular hills at a little distance from the sea." Nowhere in his diary did Bass seize upon any picturesque features of scenery, though they are not lacking in the region that he traversed.

If he was moved by a sense of the oppressiveness of vast, silent solitudes, or by any sensation of strangeness at feeling his way along a coast hitherto unexplored, the emotion finds scarcely any reflection in his record.

Hard facts, dates, times, positions, and curt memoranda, were the sole concern of the diarist.