bush and were only seen the following morning, but never afterwards.  One other and older boy, a native of Albany, whither Eyre was bound, now alone remained.  Eyre and this boy (Wylie) now pushed on in a starving condition, living upon dead fish or anything they could find for several weeks, and never could have reached the Sound had they not, by almost a miracle, fallen in with a French whaling schooner when nearly 300 miles had yet to be traversed.  The captain, who was an Englishman named Rossiter, treated them most handsomely; he took them on board for a month while their horses recruited on shore—­for this was a watering place of Flinders—­he then completely refitted them with every necessary before he would allow them to depart.  Eyre in gratitude called the place Rossiter Bay, but it seems to have been prophetically christened previously by the ubiquitous Flinders, under the name of Lucky Bay.  Nearly all the watering places visited by Eyre consisted of the drainage from great accumulations of pure white sand or hummocks, which were previously discovered by the Investigator; as Flinders himself might well have been called.  The most peculiar of these features is the patch at what Flinders called the head of the Great Australian Bight; these sandhills rise to an elevation of several hundred feet, the prevailing southerly winds causing them to slope gradually from the south, while the northern face is precipitous.  In moonlight I have seen these sandhills, a few miles away, shining like snowy mountains, being refracted to an unnatural altitude by the bright moonlight.  Fortunate indeed it was for Eyre that such relief was afforded him; he was unable to penetrate at all into the interior, and he brought back no information of the character and nature of the country inland.  I am the only traveller who has explored that part of the interior, but of this more hereafter.

About this time Strezletki and McMillan, both from New South Wales, explored the region now the easternmost part of the colony of Victoria, which Strezletki called Gipp’s Land.  These two explorers were rivals, and both, it seems, claimed to have been first in that field.

Next on the list of explorers comes Ludwig Leichhardt, a surgeon, a botanist, and an eager seeker after fame in the Australian field of discovery, and whose memory all must revere.  He successfully conducted an expedition from Moreton Bay to the Port Essington of King—­on the northern coast—­by which he made known the geographical features of a great part of what is now Queensland, the capital being Brisbane at Moreton Bay.  A settlement had been established at Port Essington by the Government of New South Wales, to which colony the whole territory then belonged.  At this settlement, as being the only point of relief after eighteen months of travel, Leichhardt and his exhausted party arrived.  The settlement was a military and penal one, but was ultimately abandoned.  It is now a cattle station in the northern territory division of South Australia, and belongs to some gentlemen in Adelaide.