—­F.M.  HUGHAN.

. . .

Concluding observations.

The narrative I have felt called upon to give to the public, founded on an unexaggerated statement of facts, with many of which no other person could have been so well acquainted, is now concluded,—­with the natural anguish of a father for the loss of a son of whom he was justly proud, and who fell a victim to incapacity and negligence not his own.  Still, I have no desire to claim merit for him to which he is not entitled, or to abstract an iota from what is justly due to others.  The Report of the Royal Commission is to be found at full in the Appendix; unaccompanied necessarily by the mass of conflicting evidence, trustworthy, contradictory, misinterpreted or misunderstood, on which it was based.  The members who composed that court were honourable gentlemen, who investigated patiently, and I have no doubt conscientiously.  But there were many present, with myself, who witnessed the examinations, and wondered at some points of the verdict.  We find the judgment most severe on the leader who sacrificed his life, and whose mistakes would have been less serious and fatal had his orders been obeyed.  There is also a disposition to deal leniently with the far heavier errors and omissions of the Exploration Committee; and an unaccountable tendency to feel sympathy for Brahe, whose evidence left it difficult to decide whether stupidity, selfishness, or utter disregard of truth was his leading deficiency.

It now only remains to sum up a brief retrospect of the active spirit of discovery set astir, and not likely to die away, as a sequel to the great Burke and Wills Expedition, for by that name it will continue to be known.  We have already seen that the Victoria steamer, under Commander Norman, was sent round to the Gulf of Carpentaria to search for the missing explorers, had they reached that part of the coast; and to expedite and assist land parties in advancing, southwards, to their aid.  Captain Norman suffered some delay by the unfortunate wreck of the Firefly, a trader, laden with horses, coals, and straw; and having on board Mr. Landsborough and party, who were to start from the Albert river, or thereabouts.  This wreck occurred on the 4th September, 1861, on one of the group of islands to the north, called Sir Charles Hardy’s Islands.  On the 7th, they were found by Commander Norman, and through his great personal exertions, ably seconded by his officers and crew, he got the ship off, with the greater part of the horses and coals, and nearly all the stores.

On the 1st of October, they reached the mouth of the Albert.  On the 14th of the same month, Landsborough started for the head of that river, as far as it was navigable, in the Firefly, under the command of Lieutenant Woods of the Victoria; and on the 17th they were landed about twelve miles up the stream.  It was past the middle of November before Mr. Landsborough resumed his onward course; and as his explorations had little to do with an endeavour to discover the tracks of the Victorian Expedition, although he gained much credit by his exertions, it is unnecessary to detail them more minutely here.  I shall merely say that he followed a course south by east, skirting the country rather more to the westward than the track followed by previous explorers, and eventually reached Victoria.