If it were considered that such an act as the seizure of the Venus would be likely to precipitate a declaration of war, the motive for secrecy was strong.

Secrecy, moreover, would have been in complete conformity with Spanish methods in South America.

It is not recorded whether the seizure of the Venus occurred at Callao, Valparaiso or Valdivia; but a British lieutenant, Fitzmaurice, who was at Valparaiso five years later, heard that a man named Bass had been in Lima some years before.
A friend of the Bass family residing at Lincoln in 1852 wrote a letter to Samuel Sidney, the author of The Three Colonies of Australia, stating that Bass's mother last heard of him "in the Straits of China." But this was evidently an error of memory.

If Bass ever got out of South America, he would have written to his "dear Bess," to Waterhouse, and to Flinders.
The latter, in 1814, wrote of him as "alas, now no more." There is on record a report that he was seen alive in South America in that year, but the story is doubtful.

He was a man full of affectionate loyalty to his friends, and it is not conceivable that he would have left them without news of him if any channel of communication had been open, as would have been the case had he been at liberty as late as 1814.