of the country could be detected, and the attempt was abandoned.

'I was now nearly fifty miles from water, and feared that, as it was, some of my horses would fail before I could get back to it. Yet I lingered, undecided, on the hill, reluctant to make up my mind, for I felt that, if I thus again retired, it would be a virtual abandonment of the task undertaken. I should be doing an injustice to Mr. Stuart and my men, if I did not here mention that I told them the position we were placed in, and the chance on which our safety would depend, if we went on. They might well have been excused, if they expressed an opinion contrary to such a course; but the only reply they made me was to assure me that they were ready and willing to follow me to the last. After this, I believe I sat on the hill for more than half an hour, with the telescope in my hand; but there was nothing to encourage me onward.'

Reluctantly the horses' heads were turned, and the most protracted effort yet witnessed to reach the centre of the continent was finally abandoned. The party now hastened to throw themselves back on Cooper's Creek, some 200 miles distant, and the nearest halting-place. It was a journey for life or death. The horses which refused to proceed were abandoned on the way. When a horse fell, his light baggage was hastily distributed among the rest, and the retreat continued. Uninterruptedly, night and day, they retreated. At night one of the men went before them with a lantern, and thus assisted in their course over these vast sand ridges, and through the unbroken solitude of the Stony Desert, our explorers safely reached Cooper's Creek. Over these regions, the hot winds, so disagreeably felt even on the coast settlements, blow with unusual violence. On the morning of their arrival at Cooper's Creek, one of these hot winds began to blow, and towards midday raged with great fury. The leaves of the trees along the creek became crisp in a few moments, and fell like a snow 6 shower around us.' The wastes of sand ridges, from which they had just escaped, seemed now a very ocean. The crests of the sand billows were cut off, and whirled on high in thick spray. Blinding torrents of fine sand, driven before the wind, were poured over the Cooper's Creek district, smarting and blistering the feverish skin. Towards the horizon, sea and sky were mingled in one red mass. Every living thing turned from the glow. An all-pervading relaxation seized man and beast. The horses were unable to bear the weight of their own heads. Propped against trees, and turned from the hot wind, they let their heads fall to the ground as if the muscles of the neck had been severed. A thermometer, graduated to 127°, burst from the excessive heat, though placed in the fork of a large tree.

VOL. CXVI. NO. CCXXXV.

6

D

And, in all probability, had this tempest overtaken our party in the desert, they would have all perished. Passing through Cooper's Creek district, Captain Sturt with his men again joined the main expedition at Park Depôt, greatly weakened by sickness, and scarcely capable of any further exertion. On the following day, he found himself unable to walk. In a day or two more, his muscles became rigid, and his limbs contracted. Gradually also my skin blackened. The least movement put me to torture, and I was reduced to a state of perfect prostration.' But Park Depôt was many hundreds of miles from Adelaide, and an immediate retreat was now necessary. Already another summer had come round, and the sun was drying up all the pools and watercourses on the way. It was doubtful, indeed, whether the way was still open. Mr. Brown proposed to go and ascertain, lest the expedition should be again caught in the desert. Unless Flood's Creek, about 150 miles nearer Adelaide, contained sufficient water, it would be dangerous to move the expedition, and Mr. Brown determined to learn the condition of Flood's Creek. The hide of a bullock was sewn together so as to form a water-tight bag. This, filled with water, was placed on the way some seventy miles in advance, and on the following morning Mr. Brown started with a light spring cart, containing about thirty gallons of water. By this contrivance he was enabled to supply himself and his horse with water half way on his journey, without encroaching on the store which he carried with him. Anxiously the men watched for his return. On his report depended another six months' imprisonment in Rocky Glen Depôt, and both officers and men recalled Rocky Glen Depôt with horror. On the eighth day they came to Sturt's tent to tell him that Mr. Brown had appeared in sight, and in a few minutes he stood before him. "Well, Brown," said I, "what news?-is it to be good or bad?" "There is still water in the creek," said he; "but that is all I 6 can say. What there is, is as black as ink; and we must 'make haste, for in a week it will be all gone." A bed of leaves "A was placed in one of the carts, into which Captain Sturt was lifted, and the whole expedition commenced its retreat from Central Australia. Flood's Creek was safely reached, and it enabled them to push on to the Murray. The news was carried down the Murray that Sturt, now nineteen months absent and supposed dead, was returning. The settlers along its banks hastened to place their carriages at the service of himself and his exhausted men. Under the light of an Australian moon, they again passed the clustering vines and golden wheat fields which surround Adelaide.

'I reached my home,' writes their commander, at midnight, on the 19th of January, and, on crossing its threshold, raised my wife from the floor, on which she had fallen, and heard the carriage of my considerate friends roll rapidly away.'

While the people of Adelaide were seeking an extension of settlement towards the north, the people of Sydney were also occupied by a project of their own. Between Sydney and India, China, and the rich islands of the Dutch in the Indian Archipelago, lay the whole continent of Australia. If their ships went to the south-west, there was more than half the continent to sail round. If they went to the north-east, there were the great Barrier Reef, 1,200 miles long, and the dangerous Torres Strait, where the timbers of many a stout Sydney barque lay mouldering on the small islands which choke the passage. An overland

route to the Gulf of Carpentaria would bring the Indian Archipelago almost to their door. With a practical route to the Gulf of Carpentaria, the whole commerce of Southern and Western Asia and its islands would be thrown open to the Australian colonies. What then appeared a golden dream is doubtless now on the eve of being accomplished. Burke and Wills have laid a way to the shores of the Gulf, and, but for the terrible mishap of a few hours, might have lived to see it occupied by the iron road and the electric wire.

Sir Thomas Mitchell, who was then Surveyor-General of the colony of New South. Wales, warmly advocated this project. He invited Dr. Leichhardt, who was already known for some explorations he had conducted in the neighbourhood of Moreton Bay to the north of Sydney, and which eventually laid the foundations of the new colony of Queensland, to accompany him on an expedition to the shores of the gulf. As however there was no probability that Sir Thomas Mitchell could leave Sydney during that year, Dr. Leichhardt accepted the command of the expedition, and started on his way in 1844, the same year in which Captain Sturt had already started from Adelaide. Dr. Leichhardt's journey adds nothing to our knowledge of the interior. It was entirely a coast route, and though of enormous length extending from Sydney to Port Essington, a distance, along the coast, of not less than 3000 miles-and leading the way to much excellent land afterwards occupied by the colonists of New South Wales, it would possess little interest for us now but for the impenetrable mystery which still enshrouds the fate of a succeeding expedition commanded by the same leader. Nor had it any influence whatever on the discovery of an available overland route to the Gulf of Carpentaria. An elevated coast range, we have already seen, extends from Sydney to the shores of the Gulf.

The eastern slope of this range, overlooking the Pacific, is well watered by numerous coast streams, and possesses extensive terraces of fine pastoral land, though every now and again interrupted by broken and almost impassable districts. Along these slopes Dr. Leichhardt led his party, with abundance of water and pasture for the cattle; but its position, and the nature of the country, render it, for a commercial high road, as little useful as the north-west passage to India.

In the following year, Sir Thomas Mitchell started in his turn, with Mr. Kennedy,-a young surveyor, in the employment of the Government, Dr. Stephenson, and a wellequipped party of twenty-six men. Dr. Leichhardt, we have seen, proceeded along the eastern slope of the Great Dividing Range. Sir Thomas Mitchell now decided on examining its summit and western slope, expecting to pick up some stream, at its source, which would lead him to the shores of the gulf. No such passage was found; but the discoverer of Australia Felix was, in a great measure, compensated by the magnificent country which now disclosed itself within tropical Australia,—in many spots, indeed, exceeding in luxuriance and beauty of scenery the Australia Felix of 1835. Advancing beyond the Darling, and making direct for the tropic, Sir Thomas Mitchell found himself within a network of streams, taking their rise in the Dividing Range, and flowing through the broad rich table-lands which were now found to form its highest elevation. Here, at the very time Captain Sturt and his men, in the same latitude, and at the foot of the very same Dividing Range, were buffeting the red sand billows and inhaling the scorching blast of the desert, the expedition under Sir Thomas Mitchell was wandering through the most lovely Claude-like scenery, and following the course of such streams as prompted their discoverer to name them, the Claude,' the 'Lorraine,' the 'Salvator,' &c.

'Here,' he writes, the weather was most pleasant, temperate, and English-like, though we were still within the tropics. A sweet breeze blew from the south-west, and the degree of temperature was between 50 and 60 degrees of Fahrenheit, the most agreeable of any, I believe, to the human frame. There was abundance of water, and the young grass was daily growing higher.'

But Sir Thomas Mitchell's chief discovery in this district was the river Victoria,- of course, wholly unconnected with Captain Stokes' Victoria, on the North-West Coast, at the opposite extremity of the continent. Here, at length, appeared to be the long-sought stream opening a passage to the Gulf of Carpentaria; and anxiously the expedition followed it down the western

slopes and table-lands of the Great Dividing Range, along banks waving with perfumed lilies, through rich deep meadows, with splendid reaches of water, capable, as Sir Thomas Mitchell writes, of floating steamers of the largest tonnage. The Victoria was followed for about 200 miles, when the provisions of the expedition, reduced by their previous explorations, totally failed them, and the pursuit was abandoned, though the stream appeared still tending towards the north. Strangely enough, Sturt and Mitchell were then on the banks of the same stream, -for the Victoria and Cooper's Creek have been since ascertained to be the same river,- and could they then have compared notes, it would have been known that the hopes of a passage to the north, by the Victoria, were altogether delusive. That stream, shortly after Sir Thomas Mitchell's farthest point on it, takes a turn towards the south, and thenceforward maintains an entirely southern course. Mr. Gregory, who, at a subsequent period, followed the course of the Victoria through most inhospitable wastes, ridges of red drift sand, ten to fifty 'feet high, running parallel to each other, and in a nearly north and south direction,-boundless mud plains, and tracts resem'bling the stony desert described by Captain Sturt,'- found it, at length, to form the western arm of Lake Torrens, which is separated from the head of Spencer Gulf, near Adelaide, by a narrow isthmus, flooded only during a rainy season.

Of the Victoria, however, nothing was then known in Sydney, save what Sir Thomas Mitchell had just seen. A noble stream, through a garden of lilies, and making for the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria, seemed well worth following, and Mr. Kennedy, the second in command of Sir Thomas Mitchell's late expedition, was instructed to trace its further course. Taking it up where the late expedition had been forced to retreat on Sydney, this young officer proceeded along its banks. But, even in the comparatively short distance between Mitchell's furthest and the rich Cooper's Creek district, the Victoria traverses an absolute desert. Scarcely any water, and no food for the horses, could be found; the river-bed had taken a permanently southern direction, and, as a road to the north, was valueless. Having satisfied himself, therefore, that the Victoria was the Cooper's Creek of which Captain Sturt had just brought intelligence to Adelaide, Mr. Kennedy returned to Sydney.

We may here, almost without interruption to the order of events, follow the short career of this spirited young officer.

Though unable to discover a practical overland route to the bead of the Gulf of Carpentaria, the people of Sydney were not inclined to abandon all hope of communication with its