On February 1802, the 142-ton brig Venus cleared Sydney Heads to begin a trading voyage through the islands of the Pacific. On board as captain was one of her owners, the surgeon, the navigator, adventurer and now entrepreneur George Bass. Neither Bass nor the Venus completed the voyage. They simply vanished into the Pacific. The questions are many. Was the Venus wrecked on the coast of new Zealand? Did the ship sink in a storm? Or, as some reports  suggest did Bass reach South America only to be imprisoned by the Spanish?

The brilliant and charismatic George Bass embodied the Age of Enlightenment. He was a man of intense intellectual curiosity, of wide ranging talents and contradictions as well. He had friends among Sydney's political radicals but was also of the establishment. He was a skilled surgeon who preferred navigation to medicine, a naval officer who put his career on hold in an attempt to make a fortune and a man deeply in love but who abandoned his beloved Bess Bass for the rewards of an adventurous voyage into commerce.