The only place we have visited since my last budget to you was Port Essington, a military post which has been an object of much attention for some time past in connection with the steam navigation between Sydney and India.  It is about the most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole in Her Majesty’s dominions.  Placed fifteen miles inland on the swampy banks of an estuary out of reach of the sea breezes, it is the most insufferably hot and enervating place imaginable.  The temperature of the water alongside the ship was from 88 to 90, i.e. about that of a moderately warm bath, so that you may fancy what it is on land.  Added to this, the commandant is a litigious old fool, always at war with his officers, and endeavouring to make the place as much of a hell morally as it is physically.  Little more than two years ago a detachment of sixty men came out to the settlement.  At the parade on the Sunday I was there; there were just ten men present.  The rest were invalided, dead, or sick.  I have no hesitation in saying that half of this was the result of ill-management.  The climate in itself is not particularly unhealthy.  We were all glad to get away from the place.

[Another is to his sister, under date Sydney, March 14, 1849:—­]

By the way, I may as well give you a short account of our cruise.  We started from here last May to survey what is called the inner passage to India.  You must know that the east coast of Australia has running parallel to it at distances of from five miles to seventy or eighty an almost continuous line of coral reefs, the Great Barrier as it is called.  Outside this line is the great Pacific, inside is a space varying in width as above, and cut up by little islands and detached reefs.  Now to get to India from Sydney, ships must go either inside or outside the Great Barrier.  The inside passage has been called the Inner Route in consequence of its desirability for steamers, and our business has been to mark out this Inner Route safely and clearly among the labyrinth-like islands and reefs within the Barrier.  And a parlous dull business it was for those who, like myself, had no necessary and constant occupation.  Fancy for five mortal months shifting from patch to patch of white sand in latitude from 17 to 10 south, living on salt pork and beef, and seeing no mortal face but our own sweet countenances considerably obscured by the long beard and moustaches with which, partly from laziness and partly from comfort, we had become adorned.  I cultivated a peak in Charles I style, which imparted a remarkably peculiar and triste expression to my sunburnt phiz, heightened by the fact that the aforesaid beard was, I regret to say it, of a very questionable auburn—­my messmates called it red.