(Footnote.  This set of the tide being rather across the channel renders the passage between King Island and Reid’s rocks by no means recommendable.  Captain King on returning to New South Wales, used this passage and was very nearly wrecked; the set of the tides at that time not being known.  It appears they saw the south point of King Island just at dark, and shaped a course well wide of Reid’s rocks; they found themselves, however, drifted by the tide close on them.  We made the time of high-water at the full and change of the moon in this entrance of the Strait to be half an hour before noon; but the western stream began three hours and a half before, and the eastern again precedes low-water by the same amount of time.)

A SECURE ANCHORAGE.

Early on the morning of December 3rd, we reached a secure anchorage between Three Hummock Island, and Hunter, formerly called Barren Island; and we had every reason to be thankful at finding ourselves in such a snug berth, for during our stay, we experienced gales from east and west, with such sudden changes that no ship could have saved herself.  This made us sensible how necessary it was to choose anchorages sheltered from both winds.  Our surveying operations were sadly delayed by this boisterous weather.

Three Hummock Island receives its name from three peaks rising on its eastern side.  The south rises abruptly from the water and forms a singular sugarloaf 790 feet high.  It is composed of granite, boulders of which front many of the points, forming strange figures.  The whole of the island is clothed with an almost impervious scrub, which growing laterally forms a perfect network, so that it is impossible to traverse it.  Mr. Bynoe procured few specimens of birds in consequence.  The woodcutters one day cut a small brown opossum in half:  it seemed to be a very rare if not a new animal; but unfortunately the head part could not be found.  Small brown rats were very numerous, they had rather short tails with long hind feet, and sat up like kangaroos.

The trees on this island are small and stunted, being chiefly Banksia and Eucalypti.  Water is plentiful.  We supplied the ship from wells dug on the north point of a sandy bay on the South-East side of the island.*

(Footnote.  The reef that so nearly sealed the Mermaid’s fate with Captain King, we found to lie half a mile north-west from the north-east end of Three Hummock Island.)

BARREN ISLAND.

Hunter Island well deserves its former name of Barren, for it is perfectly treeless; a green kind of scrub overruns its surface, which at its highest point is three hundred feet above the level of the sea.  In form it is like a closed hand with the fore-finger extended, pointing north.  The inclination of its strata differs, dipping to the sea on both sides, east and west.  These at first sight appeared to be of the same kind of sandstone that we had seen so much of on the North-West coast, but on closer inspection I found they were raised beaches; the prevailing mass of the island was a granitoid rock.