(Footnote.  In volume 1 will be found mention of the bad weather met with by the Beagle in this month on the north-west coast.  For further information on this subject see Mr. Thom’s interesting Inquiry into the Nature and Course of Storms London 1845.)

An observation I made on visiting this time the upper course of the Swan, is worth recording.  Many parts were perfectly dry, more so than any I had seen on the Victoria, and yet I was informed that last year those very parts were running with a good stream.  It seems reasonable to infer, therefore, that in certain seasons of the year the Victoria, though dry in some places when I visited it, is a full and rapid river.

During our stay the Colonial schooner, Champion, returned from an unsuccessful search for the mouth of the Hutt River, discovered by Captain Grey in the neighbourhood of Moresby’s Flat-topped Range.  Near the south end of it, however, they found a bay affording good anchorage.

ROTTNEST ISLAND.

March 25.

We moved the ship to Rottnest Island, to collect a little material for the chart, and select a hill for the site of a lighthouse.  The one we chose lies towards the south-east end of the island, bearing North 76 degrees West (true) twelve miles and a quarter from Fremantle gaol.  The Governor and Mr. Roe accompanied us to Rottnest, where we found that a penal establishment of Aboriginal prisoners had been formed during our absence.

ABORIGINAL CONVICTS.

No one would say that the Australian natives cannot work, if they could just see the nice cottages of which this settlement is composed.  The Superintendent merely gives the convicts a little instruction at first, and they follow his directions with astonishing precision.  They take great pride in showing visitors their own work.  It is an interesting though sorrowful sight to see these poor fellows—­some of them deprived of their liberty for life, perhaps for crimes into which they have been driven by the treatment they receive from those who have deprived them both of their land and of their liberty.  Many, if not most of them, are in some measure unconscious of guilt; and they are almost incapable of appreciating the relation between what they have committed and the punishment which has fallen on them.  Their minds are plunged in the darkest ignorance; or if they know anything beyond the means of satisfying their immediate wants, it is that they have been deprived of their rightful possessions by the men whose chains they wear.  Surely this reflection should now and then present itself to the white man who is accustomed to treat them so harshly, and induce him to judge more leniently of their acts, and instead of confining himself to coersive measures for protection, make him resort to the means which are within his reach of raising the despised and oppressed savage more nearly to a level with himself in the scale of humanity.