The country round Keppel Bay mostly consists either of stony hills, or of very low land covered with salt swamps and mangroves.  Almost all the borders of the bay, and of the several arms into which it branches, are of this latter description; so that there are few places where it was not necessary to wade some distance in soft mud, and afterwards to cut through a barrier of mangroves, before reaching the solid land.

Mention has been made of the ridge of hills by which the low land on the south side of the bay is bounded.  The upper parts of it are steep and rocky, and may be a thousand, or perhaps fifteen hundred feet high, but the lower sloping sides are covered with wood; Mount Larcom and the hills within the ridge, are clothed with trees nearly to the top; yet the aspect of the whole is sterile.  The high land near the western arm, though stony and shallow in soil, is covered with grass, and trees of moderate growth; but the best part of the country was that near Cape Keppel; hill and valley are there well proportioned, the grass is of a better kind and more abundant, the trees are thinly scattered, and there is very little underwood.  The lowest parts are not mangrove swamps, as elsewhere, but pleasant looking vallies, at the bottom of which are ponds of fresh water frequented by flocks of ducks.  Cattle would find here a tolerable abundance of nutritive food, though the soil may perhaps be no where sufficiently deep and good to afford a productive return to the husbandman.

After the mangrove, the most common trees round Keppel Bay are different kinds of eucalyptus, fit for the ordinary purposes of building.  A species of Cycas, described by captain Cook (Hawkesworth, III. 220, 221) as a third kind of palm found by him on this coast, and bearing poisonous nuts, was not scarce in the neighbourhood of West-arm Hill.  We found three kinds of stone here:  a greyish slate, quartz and various granitic combinations, and a soft, whitish stone, saponaceous to the touch; the two first were often found intermixed, and the last generally, if not always lying above them.  The quartz was of various colours, and sometimes pure; but never in a state of crystallisation.

Wherever we landed there had been Indians; but it was near the ship only, that any of them made their appearance.  They were described by the gentlemen who saw them, as stout, muscular men, who seemed to understand bartering better than most, or perhaps any people we had hitherto seen in this country.  Upon the outer bone of the wrist they had the same hard tumour as the people of Hervey’s Bay, and the cause of it was attempted, ineffectually, to be explained to one of the gentlemen; but as cast nets were seen in the neighbourhood, there seems little doubt that the manner of throwing them produces the tumours.  These people were not devoid of curiosity; but several things which might have been supposed most likely to excite it, passed without notice.  Of