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LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-NO. 1124.-16 DECEMBER, 1865.

From Macmillan's Magazine.

again with a failing hand. Conceive dig

EYRE, THE SOUTH-AUSTRALIAN EX- ging through a three-foot crust of pleiocene

PLORER.

BY HENRY KINGSLEY.

formation, filled with crude, almost imbecile, forms of the lowest animal life, millions of ages later than Eozoon Canadense, yet hardly higher; and then finding shifting sea-sand below! Horrible, most horrible!

THE colony of South Australia, now the largest of the five colonies, was, about the This, the most awful part of the earth's year 1841, practically the smallest. The area crust, a thousand miles in length, has been available, either for cultivation or pastur- crossed once, and once only. Not by a age, seemed at that time to be extremely well-appointed expedition with camels, with limited. Northward of the colony lay, or horse-drays, preserved meats, and a fiddler; seemed to lie, the hideous, hopeless basin of but by a solitary man on foot. A man irLake Torrensa land of salt mud and ritated by disappointment; nigh worn-out shifting sand, from the description of Sturt by six months' dread battle with nature in and Eyre, in which human life was impos- her cruelest form: a man who, having been sible, and the external aspects of which commissioned to do something in the way of were so horrible that the eye wearied with exploration, would not return home withlooking on them, and the sickened soul soon out results: a man in whose path lurked brooded itself into madness. North-west- murder, foul, treacherous, unexpected ward had as yet been discovered but grass- the murder of a well-tried friend. To such less deserts, while westward no human foot a man has hitherto been reserved the task had penetrated beyond Eyre's peninsula. of walking a thousand miles round the But the coast line to the west, between Port Australian Bight. Was there ever such a Lincoln, in South Australia, and King walk yet? I have never heard of such anGeorge's Sound, in West Australia, a dis- other. tance of thirteen hundred miles, had been surveyed by Flinders from the sea, and pronounced by him to be what it is.

That main part of the South-Australian coast called the Australian Bight is a hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams. For seven hundred miles there is no harbour fit to shelter a mere boat from the furious south wind, which rushes up from the Antarctic ice to supply the vacuum caused by the burning, heated, waterless continent. But there is worse than this. For eleven hundred miles no rill of water, no, not the thickness of a baby's little finger, trickles over the cruel cliffs into the sail-less, deserted sea. I cast my eye over the map of the world, and see that it is without parallel anywhere. A land which seems to have been formed not by the 'prentice hand of nature, but by nature in her dotage. A work badly conceived at first, and left crude and unfinished by the thead of the artist. Old thoughts, old conceptions which produced good work, and made the earth glad cycles agone, attempted THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXI.

Of this Mr. Eyre, who made this unparalleled journey, I know but little, save this:He knew more about the aboriginal tribes, their habits, language, and so on, than any man before or since. . He was appointed Black Protector for the Lower Murray, and did his work well. He seems to have been (teste Charles Sturt, from whom there is no appeal) a man eminently kind, generous, and just. No man concealed less than Eyre the vices of the natives, but no man stood more steadfastly in the breach between them and the squatters (the great pastoral aristocracy) at a time when to do so was social ostracism. The almost unexampled valour which led him safely through the hideous desert into which we have to follow him, served him well in a fight more wearing and more dangerous to his rules of right and wrong. He pleaded for the black, and tried to stop the war of extermination which was, is, and I suppose will be, carried on by the colonists against the natives in the unsettled districts beyond reach of the public eye. His task was hopeless. It was easier for him to find water in the desert than to. 1431.

find mercy for the savages. Honour to him | barren region, bounded (if the reader will for attempting it, however. kindly look at his Keith Johnston, plate 19, It is interesting to remember also, that enlarged plate of Australia in the corner, this band of country of which we have been or at any available map of Australia) by speaking practically divides the penal set- Lakes Torrens, Gregory, and Blanchetlement of Western Australia from the crossing the quasi-embouchure of Lake civilized republics of the eastern coast, and Torrens into the sea, and crossing that must be crossed by any convict who should great peninsula which now bears his name, make his escape. The terror of the colon-Eyria;" and, after various difficulties and ists which showed itself in such extreme aggravations, he formed a depôt of his party irritation the other day, when it was pro- at Streaky Bay, just a thousand miles on posed to send more criminals to Perth, was the eastern or wrong side of King George's not without foundation, however. There Sound, the object of his journey. very little doubt that a practicable route exists from the east to the west, in the centre of the continent, about a thousand miles to the north of the southern coast probably, I have thought for a long time, by the Valley of the Murchison.

is

It was originally proposed to send out an expedition under the command of Mr. Eyre, to cross the bight to the westward; but his opinion was that although a light party might force their way, yet their success would be in the main useless, as it would be impossible ever to follow with stock in consequence of the badness of the country, and thus the main object of the expedition would be missed, and the expense incurred without adequate commercial results. The committee, therefore, yielding to his representations, commissioned him to go north, and attempt to explore the interior.

Here weary months were past, in desperate fruitless efforts to find a better country to the westward or northward. No water was to be had except by digging, and that was generally brackish, sometimes salt. The country was treeless and desolate, of limestone and sand, the great oolite cliffs, which wall the ocean for so many hundred miles, just beginning to rise towards the surface. The heat was so fearful that, on one of the expeditions which Mr. Eyre made westward, a strong courageous man lay down, as uneducated men will do when things get to a certain stage of desperation. But Eyre got him up again, and got him down to the shore, where they found the shadow of a great rock in that weary land, and saved themselves by bathing the whole afternoon. This was the sort of country they had to contend with.

Eyre succeeded in rounding the head of the bight by taking a dray full of water with him, making a distance of 138 miles. The country, however, did not improve, and after seven months, he was back at his depôt at Fowler's Bay (lat. 32° S. long. 132° E.) with no better results than these.

In this he was unsuccessful. Four hundred miles to the north of Adelaide he got into the miserable country, known then as the basin of Lake Torrens now known as Lakes Gregory, Torrens and Blanche a flat depressed region of the interior, not far from equal to the basin of Lake Superior, of The expedition had hitherto consisted of alternate mud, brackish water, and sand; Mr. Eyre, Mr. Scott, Mr. Eyre's overseer, after very wet seasons probably quite cov- two Englishmen, a corporal of engineers, ered with water, but in more moderate ones and two natives. Moreover, a small ship intersected with bands of dry land varying had been at his command, and had more in size. It is certain that in 1841 Eyre than once communicated with Adelaide. found a ring of water round him five hun- It had been Mr. Eyre's later plan to take dred miles in extent, and that in 1860 Mac- part of his party over-land, and keep this Kinlay crossed it, finding nothing but a vessel to co-operate with him; but the andesert fifty miles broad, without water visi-swer from Adelaide was inexorable, though ble on either hand,-came immediately into good country abounding with water, and crossed the continent from south to north.

Such an achievement was not for Eyre. To MacKinlay and others was left the task of showing the capabilities of Australia: to Eyre that of showing her deficiencies. Beaten back from the north at all points, he determined to follow out the first plan of the expedition, and try the coast line westward. He forced his way out of this horrid

polite: the vessel must not leave the limits of the colony-must not, that is to say, go farther west than long. 130° E.; no farther, indeed, than Eyre had been himself. This was a great disappointment and perplexity. What to do?- But home save by one route- never! After very little cogitation he came to the following desperate resolution, to dismiss the whole of the expedition except one man, and with three natives to face the thing out himself.

Taking his young companion, Mr. Scott, | so, and that not ten educated persons living ever heard of his name.

to walk with him upon the shore, he unfolded his plan to him, and gently but firmly dismissed him. Scott pleaded hard to share the danger, but Eyre was immovable. He had selected another, a trusty, tried servant and comrade for years past, the man hitherto mentioned as his over

seer.

This man Mr. Eyre took on one side, and spoke to most earnestly. He pointed the almost hopelessness of their task-the horror of the country before them, the perils of thirst, the perils of savages, the awful distance, nine hundred miles. Then he told him that he was free to return to Adelaide and civilization, and leave him alone; and then he asked him, Would he go now? And the answer was, "Yes, by heaven, to the very end!"

His name is worth recording-John Baxter. A good sound, solid English name. The man himself, too, seems to have been nobly worthy of his name, and to have possessed no small portion of the patient and steadfast temper of his great Shropshire namesake.

The six weeks passed; the horses and men got into good condition, as well fit for their hopeless journey as horses and men were ever likely to be. It became time to start, and they prepared to start; and here occurs one of those curious coincidences of time which do not startle us in a novel like "Aurora Floyd," because we know that the author has command of time and space, and uses them with ability for our amusement, but which do startle us, and become highly dramatic, when we find them in a commonplace journal, like that of Eyre. Eyre and Baxter were engaged in burying such stores as they could not take with them, when they heard a shot from the bay. Thinking some whalers had come in, they hurriedly concealed their work, and went towards the shore. It was no whaler. It was their own cutter, the Hero, which had been to Adelaide, and had returned. The two men they met on the shore were the captain of the Hero and young Scott, who brought a message, and innumerable letters.

"You

The message verbally delivered, nay, enBaxter remaining firm, his plan required forced by Scott, and the gist of the innuno more maturing. Although the Adelaide merable letters, was all the same. Government had refused to allow the have failed in your plans of invading our schooner to co-operate with him, they had hopeless interior country. So did Sturt generously sent him everything else he had and others. But don't take it to heart. asked. With a view to his westward jour- Come back to us. You have done and sufney, he had asked them to send him large fered enough to make the colony love and quantities of bran and oats, to put his respect you. Come back to us, and we will horses in sad, low condition in this almost give you a welcome, with three times three. grassless desert into such strength as But for God's sake give up this hopeless would enable them to start with some wild suicidal solitary expedition to the West. hope of success. They had done so, and You yourself first pointed out the hopelessnow Eyre, dismissing all his companions ex-ness of such an expedition, and we see from cept Baxter and three natives, determin- your reports how utterly hopeless it is; ed to remain encamped where he was, you were right. Come back, and make a until the bran and oats were consumed, fresh start. Don't in your noble obstinacy and then set out. commit suicide."

So in camp he remained for six weeks, his horses improving day by day. Baxter, the self devoted hero, was a somewhat diligent and unromantic hero, and all this time worked like a galley-slave. A strange fellow this quiet Baxter. He could make shoes among other things, could shoe the horses, make pack-saddles, do a hundred and fifty things; all of which he did with steady, quiet diligence this lonely six weeks, as if a little voice was ever singing in his ear, "The night cometh in which no man can work." I confess that I should have liked to know that man Baxter, but that is impossible; one can only say that once there was a very noble person whom men called

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go westward, thank you, to such fate as God shall send. Will not at all events return an unsuccessful man; will leave my bones in the desert sooner than that. And so good-by, young Scott; Baxter and I will pull through it somehow or won't. Love to Adelaide friends, and many thanks for kind wishes (not a word about the twopenny-halfpenny business of refusing him the ship), and so we will start if you please. As for going home again, save by King, George's Sound, once for all, No."

A most obstinate and wrongheaded man. Baxter, it seems, equally wrongheaded. Scott went back with his message, and Eyre and Baxter started, with three savages, on their journey.

One of these savages requires notice from us; his name was Wylie. A frizzly-haired, slab-sided, grinning, good-natured young rascal; with infinite powers of giggling on a full belly, and plaintively weeping on an empty one- at least so I should guess. But withal some feeling of a faithful doglike devotion in the darkened soul of him, as events proved-something more in the inside of the man than any marmoset or other monkey ever had got, or ever would get after any number of cycles, one cannot help thinking. This fellow Wylie was a man after all; as were, indeed, the other two natives, though bad enough specimens of the genus.

and with these resources, Eyre formed a flying column, cut himself off from his base of operations, and entered on a march of eight hundred and fifty miles through a hopelessly hostile country. Hostile, not so much because the natives he might meet on his march outnumbered him as fifty to one, but because Nature herself was in her cruel thirsty sleep of summer, and was saying to him, in every high floating yellow cloud which passed over his head southward, "Fool, desist; I am not to be troubled yet." Murder too was looking at him out of two pairs of shifting eyes; but he did not see her, and went on.

On the 26th of February, 1841, they made a place called by the few scattered natives Yeercumban Kowee, the farthest point they had hitherto reached in any of their excursions from the camp. It is so much less abominable than the country around that the natives have thought it worthy of a name. It is in fact a few hills of driving sand, where, by digging, one may obtain water; but, for all that, the best place in seven hundred miles of coast. It is the sort of place in which an untravelled reader would suppose a man would lie down and die in despair, merely from finding himself there: would suppose so until he found out how very little man can live with, and how very, very dear life gets in great solitude. Or, to correct myself once more, how very, very strong in such situations becomes the desire of seeing a loved face again; or, failing that, of seeing a face which will connect one, however distantly, with the civilization which is so far off, with the face of a man who will at all events tell those for whose applause we strive how we strove and how we died.

Having now brought my reader on to the real starting point of the great adventure, we may as well sum up the forces by which this campaign against nature, in her very worst mood, was to be accomplished. The party which accompanied Mr. Eyre when he took a final farewell of Mr. Scott, on the morning of the 25th of February, 1841, consisted of-John Baxter, the useful Here the terrible part of his adventure hero; the black boy, Wylie, before spoken begins. From this he was 128 miles withof; two other black boys; nine horses; a out water, toiling over the summit of those Timor pony (a small kind of fiend or devil, great unbroken cliffs which form the southwho has been allowed, for purposes, to as-ern buttress of Australia. I must say halfsume the form of a diminutive horse, and a-dozen words about these cliffs, once and in comparison with which Cruiser, or Mr. for all. Gurney's gray colt, would show like Cotswold lambs who have joined the Band of Hope); a foal (the best part of one of your highbred weedy Australian colts is a certain cut out of the flank; if you are lucky enough to happen upon a Clydesdale foal, try a steak out of the shoulder-but this is mere cannibalism); and six sheep-merinos (ten pounds to the quarter, at the outside). Along the shore Eyre had, in a previous expedition, buried flour enough to last the party, at the rate of six pounds a week, for nine weeks. With this army,

These cliffs make two great stretches; first from the 131st to the 129th parallel, east of Greenwich, 120 miles, and then again from the east of the 126th parallel to east of the 124th, a distance of 120 miles more. The range from 300 to 600 feet high-the height, let us say, of the ghastly chalk wall at Alum Bay, or the cliffs between Folkestone and Dover-and are unbroken almost by a single ravine leading to the sea; and, where such ravines do occur, they are only waterless sandy valleys. Their geological formation is very fantastic. The strata

was more promise of some drain of underground water ahead. He decided to go on, and, at the 135th mile, came upon sandhills, with a few holes which the natives had dug for water.

are level, showing a gradual upheaval from whether he should go back or not. He a vastly distant centre. The upper half saw, however, miles ahead, that the cliff consists of a limestone-corresponding in had receded from the sea, and that there some way, I guess, to the Maestricht beds of Europe, but infinitely harder, the lower part of chalk, very soft and friable, with horizontal beds of flint. The lower half has succumbed to the sea and to the weather at a far quicker rate than the upper, leaving it overhanging. In many places, the upper strata have come crashing down, a million tons at a time, producing, in that land of hopeless horror, a specimen of coast scenery more weird and wild than one has ever seen, or, to tell the truth, wishes to see. One would rather read about such places among the rustling leaves of this English October.

Eyre judged that his first spell towards water would be a long one. He started first with two horses, a black young man, and the sheep, leaving Baxter and the two other blacks to follow with the rest of the horses. The black he took with him was, I think Wylie, the good one, but I am not sure. It does not much matter. His royal laziness behaved much as they always do: insisted on riding the saddle horse, and making Eyre walk and lead the pack horse; Eyre also doing what civilized men always do on such occasions, submitting. And in this way they went for four days, with just enough water to keep them alive, but none for the horses or the poor creeping sheep. On the fourth day, rain threatened, but none fell; the sheep could get no further so they made a yard of boughs, and left them for Baxter to pick up, and hurried on to find water, and if possible save the lives of the whole party, which even at this early stage seemed doomed.

At the 120th weary mile the cliffs broke for the first time, and there was a ravine to the sea. The blacks had told them of water hereabouts, to be got by digging, but their ideas of distance were as vague as those of Melville's South Sea islander. "How ole I is? Berry ole. Thousand year. More." The question was, "Was that the place?" It is as useless to speculate what would have become of the expedition had there not happened a lucky accident, as it was for Mrs. Wilfer to calculate on what would have happened to her daughter Lavinia, if she, Mrs. Wilfer, had never got married. "With all due respect, Ma, I don't think you know either." A lucky accident did occur, however. Eyre passed this, the wrong valley, in the dark, and at daybreak found himself so far beyond it that he halted in an agony of doubt as to

Try to realize this for yourselves. Fancy being alone in London, with the depopulated ruins of it all around, and having to lead a horse to the nearest available water at Gloucester, in burning weather, through deep sand. Who would do it for a bet? And this with a knowledge that there was worse to come. But why enlarge on it? This Eyre expedition is entirely without parallel; and so comfortably forgotten too!

They scraped away five feet of sand that night, and watered the horses, now five days without drink, and unable to feed on such miserable grass as there was for sheer choking drought. Please to notice this fact, you readers who are interested about horses. It strikes one as being curious, and somewhat new. There is no such insatiable drunkard as your horse, but see what he can do if he is pushed.

Eyre had nothing with which to dig out this five feet of sand, but shells left by the natives who rambled down here, at the risk of their lives, to get fish, a certain red berry which grew hereabouts, and which I cannot identify, sea anemones, winkles, and other along-shore rubbish, which however were luxuries to them (the country behind must have been a bad one). These said shells I take it were the Australian type of those great Venus' Ears which one sees in the shell shops here, and which come from the Channel Islands. Their Latin name I have forgotten, and I have neither Turton nor Da Silva handy. A Civil Service examiner will tell you in a moment. However, he got the sand dug out with them and went to sleep: which makes pause the first.

He had now to go back, with water slung in kegs, to fetch up Baxter and the two natives, who were toiling along upon him, in that weary, waterless tract of 135 miles along which he had come. He had just got back to the dry ravine first mentioned, when he saw Baxter and party winding down the opposite side towards him. He had got over that first weary spell as well as Eyre himself.

The sheep, which Eyre had left behind for Baxter to pick up and bring on, had been now six days without water, and the horses five. Baxter had left part of the luggage and of the packhorses behind some

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