(Footnote.  It was in the rear of this range that Count Strzelecki and his companions, on their way to Western Port, experienced the sufferings related in the Port Phillip Herald, June 1840, from which I extract the following:  “The party was now in a most deplorable condition.  Messrs. MacArthur and Riley and their attendants had become so exhausted as to be unable to cope with the difficulties which beset their progress.  The Count, being more inured to the fatigues and privations attendant upon a pedestrian journey through the wilds of our inhospitable interior, alone retained possession of his strength, and although burdened with a load of instruments and papers of forty-five pounds weight, continued to pioneer his exhausted companions day after day through an almost impervious tea-tree scrub, closely interwoven with climbing grasses, vines, willows, fern and reeds.  Here the Count was to be seen breaking a passage with his hands and knees through the centre of the scrub; there throwing himself at full length among the dense underwood, and thus opening by the weight of his body a pathway for his companions in distress.  Thus the party inch by inch forced their way; the incessant rains preventing them from taking rest by night or day.  Their provisions, during the last eighteen days of their journey, consisted of a very scanty supply of the flesh of the native bear or monkey, but for which, the only game the country afforded, the travellers must have perished from utter starvation...On the twenty-second day after they had abandoned their horses, the travellers came in sight of Western Port.”)

SEALER’S COVE.

Water and fuel are abundant on the point abreast of Rabbit Island.  Southward from this projection a sandy beach extends five miles, with a rivulet at either end, and separated from a small deep bay* open to the east, by a remarkable bluff, the abrupt termination of a high-woody ridge.  The trees on the south-west side were large and measured eight feet in diameter.  In the humid shelter they afforded the tree and a variety of other kinds of fern were growing in great luxuriance, with a profusion of creepers matted together in a dense mass of rich foliage.  From thence southwards the shore is rocky and the water deep.

(Footnote.  This bay is evidently Sealer’s Cove in the old charts; but this part of the Strait is so much in error that it is hardly possible to recognize any particular point.)

REFUGE COVE.

Refuge Cove, lying seven miles South 1/4 West from Rabbit Island, was our next anchorage.  It was so named from its being the only place a vessel can find shelter in from the eastward on this side of the Promontory.  Of this we ourselves felt the benefit; for although in the middle of June east winds prevailed the first few days we stayed there, with thick hazy weather, whilst at Rabbit Island we had constant westerly gales with a great deal of hail and sleet.  This small cove, being only a cable wide at the entrance may be recognized by Kersop Peak, which rises over the south part, and from its lying between Cape Wellington and Horn Point,* and also from its being the first sandy beach that opens north of the former.