As if the year 1848, when Europe seemed convulsed with some strange tempest of riot and turmoil, should not be unmarked in Australia, two of the most disastrous expeditions in the annals of exploration started during its course. One, Leichhardt's, as we have just seen, vanished, and all must have perished. Of the other, under Kennedy, two ghastly famished spectres, that had once been white men, and a naked blackfellow, alone were rescued out of thirteen. The same impulses that led to Mitchell's and Leichhardt's northern journeys, started Kennedy on his fatal venture up the eastern slope of the long peninsula that terminates in Cape York. The desire to find a road to the north coast, so that an available chain of communication should exist between the southern settlements and a northern seaport. Kennedy started from Sydney on board the barque TAM O'SHANTER, on the 29th of April, 1848. He had twelve men in his party, including Mr. Carron as botanist, one of the survivors who published the account of the trip, and Mr. Wall, naturalist. Their outfit consisted of twenty-eight horses and one hundred sheep, besides the other necessary rations, carts, &c. The instructions were to land at Rockingham Bay, and examine the eastern coast of the peninsula, to Port Albany in the extreme north, where a ship would meet and receive them. Such was the programme, alas for the performance! On the 30th of May, they landed in Rockingham Bay, with the loss of one horse, and Kennedy made his first acquaintanceship with the tropical jungles of northern Queensland (that now is), including the terrible lawyer vine [Calamus Australis.] and the stinging tree. The first, a vine with long hooks and spurs on it, that once fast, seem determined never to let go again; the stalk being as tenacious and tough as wire, and binding the scrub trees together so as to render advance impossible without first cutting a way. The other, a tree with broad leaves, the sting produced by touching which is so painful that horses, who on first being stung have plunged about and been stung all over, have died from the fever and inflammation caused. These scrubs, marshy ground, salt water creeks, and high mountain ranges, all inhabited by hostile natives, formed the pleasant prospect before Kennedy. From the very commencement almost, the monotonous record of Carron's journal commences day after day thus--"Cutting scrub all day." Through these marshes and swamps Kennedy strove to make for the ranges, hoping at least to find clearer country to travel through. Often during this time, he must have thought of his last journey over the boundless prairies of the Barcoo, and sighed at the contrast. The natives, too, began to annoy the travellers, and at last they were fired on and four killed and wounded.