glad if your ability as a surveyor or being able to determine the
longitude of the different places you might visit was in anyway equal to
your ability as an officer or a seaman."

A very slight perusal of Grant's narrative of his voyage enables us to
grasp the state of his feelings when he sent in his resignation. It is
evident that he thought he had not been treated fairly, and was glad to
quit New South Wales. He writes of his departure: "The mortifications and
disappointments I met with...induced me to seize the first opportunity of
leaving the country." And it seems possible that when he told King that
he had no knowledge of "nautical surveying," he said so because he knew
King thought he had not, and it looks as if the admission was made as a
pretext to obtain his passage to England, rather than for the purpose of
belittling his own capabilities. That Grant was a fine seaman goes
without saying. That he was personally courageous, his subsequent naval
services proved. He seems to have handled his ship at all times with
extraordinary care, and it may have been that he had studied marine
surveying with less assiduity than seamanship, for the chart that he made
must be admitted to be very imperfect.

Murray, his successor in the command of the brig, is best remembered as
the discoverer of Victoria, and "yet," writes Rusden, "he (Murray) merely
obeyed a distinct order in going thither to trace the coast between Point
Schanck and Cape Albany Otway noticing the soundings and everything
remarkable." Rusden might have added, that Murray probably received some
benefit from Grant's experiences, for at that time he was equally
incompetent as a marine surveyor. It is Flinders who has credited Grant
with the discovery of the coast of Victoria "as far as Cape Schanck," and
Flinders was most competent to judge as to whom the honour should belong.
On the great seaman's chart published in 1814 (Terra Australis, by M.