He went up to the new city of Adelaide.  All the buildings were of the earliest style of architecture, and were made of tea-tree and sods, or of reeds dabbed together with mud.  The hotels had no signboards, but it was easy to find them by the heaps of bottles outside.  Kangaroo flesh was 1s. 6d. a pound, but grog was cheap.  Davy was looking for a shipmate named Richard Ralph, who was then the principal architect and builder in the city.  He found him erecting homes for the immigrants out of reeds and mud.  He was paid 10 pounds or 12 pounds for each building.  He was also hunting kangaroo and selling meat.  He was married to a lady immigrant, and on the whole appeared to be very comfortable and prosperous.  Davy gave the lady a five-shilling piece to go and fetch a bottle of gin, and was surprised when she came back bringing two bottles of gin and 3s. change.  In the settlement the necessaries of life were dear, but the luxuries were cheap.  If a man could not afford to buy kangaroo beef and potatoes, he could live sumptuously on gin.  Davy walked back to the port the same evening, and next day took in ballast, which was mud dug out among the mangroves.

He arrived at Launceston in four days, and then went as coasting pilot of the barque ‘Belinda’, bound to Port Fairy to take in oil for London.  The barque took in 100 head of cattle, the first that were landed at Port Fairy.  He then went to Port Philip, and was employed in lightering cargo up the Yarra, and in ferrying between Williamstown and the beach now called Port Melbourne.  He took out the first boatman’s licence issued, and has the brass badge, No. 1, still.  Vessels at that time had to be warped up the Yarra from below Humbug Reach, as no wind could get at the topsails, on account of the high tea-tree on the banks.

OUT WEST IN 1849.

I did not travel as a capitalist, far from it.  I went up the Mississippi as a deck passenger, sleeping at night sometimes on planks, at other times on bags of oats piled on the deck about six feet high.  The mate of a Mississippi boat is always a bully and every now and then he came along with a deck-hand carrying a lamp, and requested us to come down.  He said it was “agen the rules of the boat to sleep on oats”; but we kept on breaking the rules as much as possible.

Above the mouth of the Ohio the river bank on the Missouri side is high, rocky, and picturesque.  I longed to be the owner of a farm up there, and of a modest cottage overlooking the Father of Waters.  I said, “If there’s peace and plenty to be had in this world, the heart that is humble might hope for it here,” and then the very first village visible was called “Vide Poche.”  It is now a suburb of St. Louis.

I took a passage on another boat up the Illinois river.  There was a very lordly man on the lower deck who was frequently “trailing his coat.”  He had, in fact, no coat at all, only a grey flannel shirt and nankeen trousers, but he was remarkably in want of a fight, and anxious to find a man willing to be licked.  He was a desperado of the great river.  We had heard and read of such men, of their reckless daring and deadly fights; but we were peaceful people; we had come out west to make a living, and therefore did not want to be killed.  When the desperado came near we looked the other way.