sticks; it was about five feet high and exceeded four feet in diameter, with a very slight cavity above; and seemed to have been very recently inhabited.  The rocks that formed its base were ornamented with a prostrate capparis, or calyptranthus (Calyptranthus orbicularis, Cunningham manuscript) which afforded me good flowering specimens.  In my walk I started a small black kangaroo:  it was feeding upon the seeds of a small acacia and, upon perceiving my approach, fled across the down without reaching a single bush or rock large enough to conceal itself as far as the eye could discern it, so bare and destitute of vegetation are these arid, sandy plains."* The heat of the weather was so great as not to allow of any communication with the shore, excepting between daybreak and eight o’clock.  Mr. Cunningham’s visits were therefore necessarily much confined:  this precaution I found it absolutely requisite to take to prevent the people from being exposed to the very great heat of the sun, which on shore must have been at least twenty degrees more powerful than on board, where the thermometer ranged between 71 1/2 degrees at midnight, and 85 and 87 degrees at noon.  The barometer ranged between 29.76 and 29.99 inches, and stood highest when the wind was to the eastward of south, with which winds the horizon was much clearer, and the air consequently drier than when the wind blew from the sea.

(Footnote.  Cunningham manuscript.)

As an anchorage during the summer months Dirk Hartog’s Road has everything to recommend it, excepting the total absence of fresh water which, according to the French, was not found in any part of Shark’s Bay; the anchorage is secure and the bottom clear of rocks.  There is also an abundance of fish and turtle, and of the latter a ship might embark forty or fifty every day, for they are very sluggish and make no effort to escape, perhaps from knowing the impossibility of their scrambling over the rocky barrier that fronts the shore, and dries at half ebb.  Of fish we caught only two kinds; the snapper, a species of sparus, called by the French the rouge bossu, and a tetradon which our people could not be persuaded to eat, although the French lived chiefly upon it.  There are some species of this genus that are poisonous but many are of delicious flavour:  it is described by M. Lacepede in a paper in the Annal. du Museum d’Histoire Naturelle (tome 4 page 203) as le Tetrodon argente (Tetrodon argenteus).

January 26.

On the 26th we sailed and passed outside of Dorre and Bernier’s Islands; nothing was seen of the reef that lies in mid-channel on the south side of Dorre Island:  a rippling was noticed by Mr. Roe in an East by South direction from the masthead at twenty minutes before one o’clock but, if the position assigned to it by the French is correct, we had passed it long before that time.  At six o’clock Kok’s Island, the small rocky islet that lies off the north end of Bernier’s Island, bore North 83 degrees East, distant seven miles.