Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2: Discoveries in Australia; with an Account of the Coasts and Rivers; Explored and Surveyed During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, in The; Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43. By Command of the Lords Commissioners; Of the Admiralty. Also a Narrative of Captain Owen Stanley's Visits; To the Islands in the Arafura SeaStokes, John Lort
History
Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2: Discoveries in Australia; with an Account of the Coasts and Rivers; Explored and Surveyed During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, in The; Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43. By Command of the Lords Commissioners; Of the Admiralty. Also a Narrative of Captain Owen Stanley's Visits; To the Islands in the Arafura Sea
Stokes, John Lort
Australia -- Description and travel; Australia -- Discovery and exploration; Natural history -- Australia
A mile and a half to the southward of Gun Island, opposite a
singular-looking indentation in the outer side of the reefs, a small
cluster of cliffy islets approaches within half a mile of them. It is
rather singular that in another of the group--larger than Gun Island,
lying in the centre of the lagoon, and the only one not visited by the
Beagle's boats--water should have been found by a party who came from
Swan River to save the wreck of a ship lost in 1843, close to the spot on
which the Batavia struck more than two hundred years ago. This island is
called in the chart Middle Island. The well is on the south point, and
the water, which is very good, rises and falls with the tide. Doubtless
this must have been the island on which the crew of Pelsart's ship found
water, though for some time they were deterred from tasting it by
observing its ebb and flow, from which they inferred it would prove salt.
The north point of Gun Island, which our observations placed in latitude
28 degrees 53 minutes 10 seconds South, longitude 1 degree 53 minutes 35
seconds West of Swan River, is fronted for half a mile by a reef.
MANGROVE ISLETS.
The ship was now moved to the north-east extreme of the lagoon, to which
we crossed in 17 fathoms--the depth we anchored in, a mile north-west
from a cluster of islets covered in places with mangroves, from which
they receive their name. To the southward the depth in the lagoon, as far
as a square-looking island, was 15 and 16 fathoms. The north extreme of
the south island lay three miles to the south east of the Mangrove
Islets, by which we found that its length was nearly ten miles, with a
general width of about a tenth of a mile.
One of the eastern Mangrove Islets was a mere caY, formed of large flat
pieces of dead coral, of the same kind as that of which I have before
spoken as resembling a fan, strewed over a limestone foundation one foot
above the level of the sea, in the greatest possible confusion, to the
height of five feet. In walking over them they yielded a metallic sound.
Pelsart, like Easter Group, is marked by a detached islet lying a mile
off its north-east extreme.
May 3.
We fetched in under the Lee of Easter Group as the north-west gale of
this morning commenced. The barometer did not indicate the approach of
the gale, falling with it, and acting as in those we had encountered at
Swan River.
SINGULAR SUNSET.
The sunset of the two days preceding had presented a very lurid
appearance, and the most fantastically shaped clouds had been scattered
over the red western sky. It seemed as though nature had determined to
entertain us with a series of dissolving views. Headlands and mountains
with cloud-capped pinnacles appeared and faded away; ships under sail
floated across the sky; towers and palaces reared their forms
indistinctly amid the vapour, and then vanished, like the baseless fabric
of a dream.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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