INDISPOSITION OF SEVERAL OF THE PARTY.  SICKNESS FROM DELAY AND DISAPPOINTMENT.

On my return to the boats I found that Mr. Smith was still unwell; several other men were also complaining; I myself was wearied from exertion and disappointment that my great discovery had dwindled away:  the place where we were was infested by land-crabs who kept running over us continually, and the sand which drifted before the wind got into the pores of the skin, and kept most of us in a constant state of painful irritation.  The night was therefore not a pleasant one.

March 9.

Throughout the night the winds had howled loudly and the surf broke hoarsely upon the shore.  The grey dawn of morning brought no comfort with it:  far out to seaward nothing but broken water could be seen, and half a gale of wind blew from the south by east.  The bad and insufficient food I had been compelled to eat had brought on violent sickness and other evil effects, and I found myself very ill.  As the daylight advanced report after report came to me that some one of the party had been attacked by the same diseases experienced by Mr. Smith and myself.

EXAMINATION OF THE SHORE TO THE NORTHWARD, AND OF THE COUNTRY TO THE SOUTH-EAST.

I was only well enough to write and survey a little, but I sent off a party to a point which lay about six miles to the north of us, and they on their return reported that there was a continuation of a similar shore for the next fourteen or fifteen miles, bordered in like manner by sandy muddy plains similar to those behind the hills where we were.

This party found one of the yellow and black water-snakes asleep upon a piece of dry seaweed on the beach and killed it.  The fact of this animal being found on shore proves its amphibious character.  I saw them in one instance, in December 1837, so far out at sea as to be distant 150 miles from land.

Sunday March 10.

I spent a wretched night from illness and foul weather; the roaring of the surf on the shore was so loud and incessant that to one feverish and in want of quiet and rest it was a positive distress, and both Mr. Smith, myself, and half the men were at this time seriously indisposed.  We had strong gales of wind all day from south by east, but in the afternoon I walked out for five miles in an east-south-east direction with such of the men as were able to move; nothing however could be seen but a continuation of the same barren, treeless country; we observed no signs of natives except tracks in the mud of a single man who had passed some months ago.

It annoyed me now to find that the silvering of the glasses of my large sextant was so much injured from the constant wettings it had experienced that this day it was almost useless.  I had hoped in the course of our walk to have fallen in with some game, but we did not see a single bird with the exception of some small ones, about the size of tomtits, which flew from bush to bush along the sandhills.