The two murderers followed the white man and boy during the first day, evading all Eyre’s attempts to bring them to close quarters, and calling to the remaining boy, Wylie, who refused to go to them.  They disappeared the next morning, and must have died miserably of thirst and starvation.

Seven days passed without a drop of water for the horses, before they reached the end of the line of cliffs, and providentially came to a native well amid the sand dunes.  From this point water was more frequently obtained, and what wretched horses they had left showed feeble symptoms of renewed life.  At last, when their rations were completely exhausted, they sighted a ship at anchor in Thistle Cove.  She proved to be the Mississippi, commanded by Captain Rossitur, the whaler already referred to as the first foreign vessel to enter Port Lincoln; and once more Eyre had to give thanks for relief at a most critical moment.

For ten days, in the hospitable cabin of the French whaler, he forgot his sufferings, and regained some of his lost strength.  Then, provided with fresh clothes and provisions, and with his horses freshly-shod, Eyre recommenced his weary pilgrimage, and, in July, 1841, arrived at his long-desired goal, King George’s Sound.

In reflecting upon this painful march of Eyre’s round the Great Bight, one feels an exceeding great pity that so much heroic suffering should have been spent on the execution of a purpose the fulfilment of which promised but little of economic value.  The maritime surveys had fairly established the fact that no considerable creek or river found its way into the Southern Ocean, either in or about the Great Bight.  Granted that the outflow of some of our large Australian rivers had been overlooked by the navigators, the local conditions were such as to render it virtually certain that any such omission was not made along this part of the south coast.  Here there was to be found no fringe of low, mangrove-covered flats, studded with inlets and saltwater creeks, thus masking the entrance of a river.  In some parts, a bold forefront of lofty precipitous cliffs, in others a clean-swept sandy shore, alone faced the ocean.  Flinders, constantly on the alert as he was for anything resembling the formation of a river-mouth, would scarcely have been mistaken in his reading of such a coast-line.  And the journey resulted in no knowledge of the interior, even a short distance back from the actual coast-line.  The conjectures of a worn-out, starving man, picking his way painfully along the verge of the beach, were, in this respect, of little moment.

Eyre, however, won for himself well-deserved honour for courage and perseverance, in as exacting circumstances as ever beset a solitary explorer.  The picture of the lonely man in his plundered camp bending over his murdered companion, separated from his fellow-men by countless miles of unwatered and untrodden waste, appeals resistlessly to our sympathies.  But admiration of Eyre’s good qualities has blinded many to his errors of judgment.