Numerous Heavy Cumuli Formed During The Afternoon.

March 27.

- We travelled to lat. 20 degrees 47 minutes 34 seconds. The country along the river is undulating and hilly, and openly timbered. The rock is of sandstone, and the ground is covered with quartz pebbles. In lat. about 20 degrees 49 minutes, the Suttor is joined by a river as large as itself, coming from the S.W. by W., and which changes the course of the Suttor to the N.E. Just before the junction, the large bed of the Suttor contracts into one deep channel, filled in its whole extent by a fine sheet of water, on which Charley shot a pelican. I mention this singular contraction, because a similar peculiarity was observed to occur at almost every junction of considerable channels, as that of the Suttor and Burdekin, and of the Lynd and the Mitchell. I named the river, which here joins the Suttor, after Mr. Cape, the obliging commander of the Shamrock steamer. The bed of the united rivers is very broad, with several channels separated by high sandy bergues. The country back from the river is formed by flats alternating with undulations, and is lightly timbered with silver-leaved Ironbark, rusty gum, Moreton Bay ash, and water box. The trees are generally stunted, and unfit for building; but the drooping tea trees and the flooded-gum will supply sufficient timber for such a purpose.

At our camp, at the bed of the river, granite crops out, and the sands sparkle with leaflets of gold-coloured mica. The morning was clear and hot; the afternoon cloudy; a thunder-storm to the north-east. We have observed nothing of the sea-breeze of the Mackenzie and of Peak Range, along the Suttor; but a light breeze generally sets in about nine o'clock P.M.

Charley met with a flock of twenty emus, and hunted down one of them.

March 28. - We travelled down the river to latitude 20 degrees 41 minutes 35 seconds. The country was improving, beautifully grassed, openly timbered, flat, or ridgy, or hilly; the ridges were covered with pebbles, the hills rocky. The rocks were baked sandstone, decomposed granite, and a dark, very hard conglomerate: the latter cropped out in the bed of the river where we encamped. Pebbles of felspathic porphyry were found in the river's bed. At some old camping places of the natives, we found the seed-vessels of Pandanus, a plant which I had never seen far from the sea coast; and also the empty shells of the seeds of a Cycas. Mr. Calvert, John Murphy, and Brown, whom I had sent to collect marjoram, told me, at their return, that they had seen whole groves of Pandanus trees; and brought home the seed-vessel of a new Proteaceous tree. I went to examine the locality, and found, on a sandy and rather rotten soil, the Pandanus abundant, growing from sixteen to twenty feet high, either with a simple stem and crown, or with a few branches at the top. The Proteaceous tree was small, from twelve to fifteen feet high, of stunted and irregular habit, with dark, fissured bark, and large medullary rays in its red wood: its leaves were of a silvery colour, about two inches and a half long, and three-quarters broad; its seed-vessels woody and orbicular, like the single seed-vessels of the Banksia conchifera; the seeds were surrounded by a broad transparent membrane. This tree, which I afterwards found every where in the neighbourhood of the gulf of Carpentaria, was in blossom from the middle of May to that of June. The poplar-gum, the bloodwood, the melaleuca of Mt. Stewart, the Moreton Bay ash, the little Severn tree, and a second species of the same genus with smooth leaves, were growing on the same soil. The grasses were very various, particularly in the hollows: and the fine bearded grass of the Isaacs grew from nine to twelve feet in height. Charley brought me a branch of a Cassia with a thyrse of showy yellow blossoms, which he said he had plucked from a shrub about fifteen feet high.

We encamped about two miles from the foot of a mountain bearing about N.E. from us; I called it Mount McConnel, after Fred. McConnel, Esq., who had most kindly contributed to my expedition. The Suttor winds round its western base, and, at four or five miles beyond it, in a northerly direction, and in latitude 20 degrees 37 minutes 13 seconds joins a river, the bed of which, at the junction, is fully a mile broad. Narrow and uninterrupted belts of small trees were growing within the bed of the latter, and separated broad masses of sand, through which a stream ten yards broad and from two to three feet deep, was meandering; but which at times swells into large sheets of water, occasionally occupying the whole width of the river. Charley reported that he had seen some black swans, and large flights of ducks and pelicans. This was the most northern point at which the black swan was observed on our expedition.

CHAPTER VII

THE BURDEKIN - TRANSITION FROM THE DEPOSITORY TO THE PRIMITIVE ROCKS - THACKER'S RANGE - WILD FIGS - GEOLOGICAL REMARKS - THE CLARKE - THE PERRY.

As this place afforded every convenience for killing and curing another bullock, we remained here for that purpose from the 29th March to the 2nd of April. The weather was favourable for our operations, and I took two sets of lunar observations, the first of which gave me longitude 146 degrees 1 minutes, and the second, 145 degrees 58 minutes. The mornings were generally either cloudless, or with small cumuli, which increased as the day advanced, but disappeared at sunset; the wind was, as far as I could judge, northerly, north-easterly, and easterly.

April 2. - The Suttor was reported by Charley to be joined by so many gullies and small creeks, running into it from the high lands, which would render travelling along its banks extremely difficult, that I passed to the east side of Mount McConnel, and reached by that route the junction of the Suttor with the newly discovered river, which I called the Burdekin, in acknowledgment of the liberal assistance which I received from Mrs. Burdekin of Sidney, in the outfit of my expedition. The course of this river is to the east by south; and I thought that it would most probably enter the sea in the neighbourhood of Cape Upstart. Flood marks, from fifteen to eighteen feet above the banks, showed that an immense body of water occasionally sweeps down its wide channel.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 52 of 139
Words from 51847 to 52956 of 141354