This year, 1832, was marked by the murder of Captain Barker, already mentioned as in turn Commandant of Fort Wellington and King George's Sound. He was returning from the latter place, after handing over charge to Captain Stirling, and on his way home landed on the eastern shore of St. Vincent's Gulf, to see if the waters of Lake Alexandrina, the termination of the Murray, had an outlet in the Gulf. Being unsuccessful he crossed the range and paid a visit to the lake. Anxious to obtain some bearings, he swam across the channel connecting the lake with the sea in order to ascend the sandhills on the opposite side. His companions watched him take several bearings from the top of the hill, descend out of view on the other side, and he was never seen again. One of the sealers from Kangaroo Island interrogated the blacks by means of a native woman of the island, who could speak broken English, and her account was that Barker met three natives as he descended the sand dune, who attacked and speared him, unarmed and naked as he was, and then cast his body in the breakers. These natives were of the same tribes that showed such determined hostility to Sturt when he first found the lake. Although Sturt himself felt confident that the junction of the Murray and Darling were satisfactorily proved by what he saw on his famous boat excursion, he had not convinced all of the public. Major Mitchell, for one, had an entirely different theory on the subject embracing the existence of a. dividing range between the Macquarie and Lachlan rivers which would entirely preclude the Darling and Murray from joining. Time, however, proved that Sturt's instinct had not been at fault when on reaching the junction of the two rivers in his whale-boat, he felt convinced that he there saw the outflow of his old friend, the Darling. It must be remembered that the explorations conducted by Major Mitchell were also surveys, superintended by him as Surveyor-General, which will partly explain the presence of the large body of men and equipage which it was his custom to take with him. The roll call of the members of one of his expeditions reads like that of an invading army. [See Appendix.] In order to get some additional information concerning the elevated country that Oxley had noticed to the westward between the Lachlan and the Macquarie (on which slight foundation Major Mitchell had built his theory of the two rivers running through distinctly different basins), Mr. Dixon was sent out in 1833. This gentleman, however, for some reason did not adhere to his instructions; he followed down the Macquarie for some distance and crossed to the Bogan (Sturt's New Year's Creek), then running strong, and having followed that river for sixty-seven miles, returned to Bathurst; nothing new nor important came of this expedition.