Shortly before we crossed the Great Piper River a party of convicts had run away with a fishing boat.  Although only three in number they made the fishermen take them to Banks Strait, where they forced a party of sealers to pass them over to Wilson’s Promontory.  Notwithstanding they were several weeks on the passage, waiting for fine weather at the different islands (the sealers, too, being twice their number) such was their vigilance that they never allowed them a chance of escape.  These men were afterwards seen near Sydney.

CONVICTS’ STORY.

The most remarkable coast-feature, between Waterhouse Island and the Tamar, is Stony Head, a bluff three hundred feet high,* lying twelve miles from Port Dalrymple.  A small sandy bay separates it from a point to the westward, and it is the nearest part of the main to Tenth Island.  In the neighbourhood of this headland I was induced to enter a hut at a sheep-station, by seeing stuck round a fence a number of the heads of an animal called by the colonists a hyena, from the resemblance it bears in shape and colour, though not in ferocity, to that beast.** My object was to obtain a few of these heads, which the hut-keeper, who was the only inmate, instantly gave, along with an unsolicited history of his own life.  In the early part we instantly discovered that this loquacious personage was, what he afterwards mildly confessed to be, a government man, in other words a convict, sent out of course, according to the usual story, through mistake.  It appears that he had been a drover, and that a few beasts were one morning found (quite by accident) among a herd he was driving through the West of England.  He had spent the early part of his servitude at Circular Head, where he was for some time in charge of the native woman caught stealing flour at a shepherd’s hut, belonging to the Van Diemen’s Land Agricultural Company—­a fact mentioned in a former chapter.***

(Footnote.  Of basaltic formation; whilst the rocks that prevail to the eastward are of primary character.  But as Strzelecki has written so largely on the geology of Tasmania, it will be needless for me to enter further into the subject, except to say, that the raised beaches found on the western side of Flinders, are evidences of an upheaval having recently taken place.)

(**Footnote.  This is the only animal the Tasmanian sheep-farmer is annoyed with; and from its paucity, they have not, as in New South Wales, the trouble of securing their flocks in yards or folds every night.)

(***Footnote.  See Volume 1.)

INHUMAN CONDUCT.