Strong winds. 
Cape Bossut. 
Exploration of North-west Coast. 
View of Interior. 
Birds. 
Solitary Island. 
Visit the Shore. 
Amphinome Shoals. 
Bedout Island. 
Breaker Inlet. 
Exmouth Gulf. 
Arrive at Swan River.

PORT ESSINGTON.

The period of our arrival at Port Essington had been looked forward to by all with deep interest, and, I may say, some anxiety.  Two years had elapsed since our last visit, and various and contradictory were the reports in circulation respecting the welfare of the settlement.  We were accordingly truly rejoiced to find it in a state of prosperity that will ever reflect the highest credit on the hardy few who have laboured so earnestly for its welfare.  It was an emblem of the rapidity with which, in young countries, it is possible to recover from any disaster, that the trees which had been uprooted, shattered, and riven in fragments by the hurricane of 1839, were for the most part concealed by the fresh foliage of the year; there was scarcely anything left to commemorate that dreadful visitation, but the tombs of twelve brave fellows, of the Pelorus, who lost their lives at the time.

There was a care-worn, jaundiced appearance about the settlers, that plainly revealed how little suited was the climate for Europeans to labour in; and yet there had been, I was told, no positive sickness.  The hospital, however, had been enlarged, and rendered a very substantial building.  Captain Macarthur had built a strong and well-contrived blockhouse, of the excellent kind of wood, a species of teak, before alluded to.  A new garden also had been laid out, in which the banana and pine, besides many other tropical fruits, were flourishing.  The arrow-root and sugar-cane grown here are allowed by those who have seen these plants in the West Indies not to be surpassed in excellence; and the cotton from Pernambuco, and Bourbon seed, has been valued in England at sixpence-halfpenny a pound.  The colonists were beginning to understand the seasons; they had taken out of the ground sweet potatoes nearly sufficient to last them until the next crop.  This was the first time they had been tried.  I have never seen any in South America half the size.  In short, I may say that the settlement was fast approaching the state in which was that at Raffles Bay when it was abandoned.

Considering the few days given to sporting, our game-book contains a very tolerable list, comprising seven kangaroos, twenty quails, ten ducks, seven pigeons, two pheasants, and two ibises.

The natives in the neighbourhood of Port Essington are, like all others on the continent, very superstitious; they fancy that a large kind of tree, called the Imburra-burra, resembling the Adansonia, contains evil spirits.  Here, also, as I have elsewhere observed, they fancy that after death they reappear as whites; the bones of the dead are frequently carried from place to place.