At daylight the next morning, Sturt and MacLeay rode along its bank, whilst Clayton, the carpenter, was set to work felling a tree and digging a sawpit.  Progress along the bank with the whole party was evidently impossible.  Sturt, however, had faith in the continuity of the river, and announced to MacLeay his intention to send back most of the expedition, and with a picked crew to embark in the whaleboat, committing their desperate fortunes to the stream, and trusting to make the coast somewhere, and leaving their return in the hands of Providence.

The more one regards this heroic venture, the more sublime does it appear.  The whole of the interior was then a sealed book, and the river, for aught Sturt knew, might flow throughout the length of the continent.  But the voyage was commenced with cool and calm confidence.

In a week the whaleboat was put together, and a small skiff also built.  Six hands were selected for the crew, and the remainder, after waiting one week in case of accident, were to return to Goulburn Plains and there await events.  It would be as well to embody here the names of this band.  John Harris, Hopkinson, and Fraser were the soldiers chosen, and Clayton, Mulholland, and Macmanee the prisoners.  The start was made at seven on the morning of January 7th, the whale-boat towing the small skiff.  Within about fifteen miles of the point of embarkation they passed the junction of the Lachlan, and that night camped amongst a thicket of reeds.  The next day the skiff fouled a log and sank, and though it was raised to the surface and most of the contents recovered, the bulk of them was much damaged.  Fallen and sunken logs greatly endangered their progress, but on the 14th they “were hurried into a broad and noble river.”  Such was the force with which they were shot out of the Murrumbidgee that they were carried nearly to the opposite bank of the new and ample stream.  Sturt’s feelings at that moment were to be envied, and for once in a life chequered with much disappointment he must have felt that a great reward was granted to him in this crowning discovery.  He named the new river the Murray, after Sir George Murray, the head of the Colonial Department.  As some controversy has of late arisen as to the question of Sturt’s right to confer the name, we here quote his own words, written after surveying the Hume in 1838.

“When I named the Murray I was in a great measure ignorant of the other rivers with which it is connected...I want not to usurp an inch of ground or of water over which I have not passed.”

On the bosom of the Murray they could now make use of their sail, which the contracted space in the bed of the Murrumbidgee had before prevented them from doing.  The aborigines were seen nearly every day, and once when the voyagers had to negotiate a very ticklish rapid, some of them approached quite close, and seemed to take great interest in the proceedings.