Breach the depot.

At noon, I stopped about a mile short of the depot to take sights.  After dinner we pulled on, the men looking earnestly out for their comrades whom they had left there, but none appeared.  My little arbour, in which I had written my letters, was destroyed, and the bank on which out tents had stood was wholly deserted.  We landed, however, and it was a satisfaction to me to see the homeward track of the drays.  The men were sadly disappointed, and poor Clayton, who had anticipated a plentiful meal, was completely chop fallen.  M’Leay and I comforted them daily with the hopes of meeting the drays, which I did not think improbable.

Thus, it will appear, that we regained the place from which we started in seventy-seven days, during which, we could not have pulled less than 2000 miles.  It is not for me, however, to make any comment, either on the dangers to which we were occasionally exposed, or the toil and privations we continually experienced in the course of this expedition.  My duty is, simply to give a plain narrative of facts, which I have done with fidelity, and with as much accuracy as circumstances would permit.  Had we found Robert Harris at the depot, I should have considered it unnecessary to trespass longer on the patient reader, but as our return to that post did not relieve us from our difficulties, it remains for me to carry on the narrative of our proceedings to the time when we reached the upper branches of the Morumbidgee.

Disappointed of supplies.

The hopes that had buoyed up the spirits of the men, ceased to operate as soon as they were discovered to have been ill founded.  The most gloomy ideas took possession of their minds, and they fancied that we had been neglected, and that Harris had remained in Sydney.  It was to no purpose that I explained to them that my instructions did not bind Harris to come beyond Pondebadgery, and that I was confident he was then encamped upon that plain.

We had found the intricate navigation of the Morumbidgee infinitely more distressing than the hard pulling up the open reaches of the Murray, for we were obliged to haul the boat up between numberless trunks of trees, an operation that exhausted the men much more than rowing.  The river had fallen below its former level, and rocks and logs were now exposed above the water, over many of which the boat’s keel must have grazed, as we passed down with the current.  I really shuddered frequently, at seeing these complicated dangers, and I was at a loss to conceive how we could have escaped them.  The planks of our boat were so thin that if she had struck forcibly against any one branch of the hundreds she must have grazed, she would inevitably have been rent asunder from stem to stern.

Complete exhaustion of the men—­one loses his senses.