On the 13th of August, he reached Mitchell's lowest camp on the Victoria River, and started to trace the river down. During the first day's journey he came across some natives, from one of whom he learnt that the aboriginal name of the river was the Barcoo. Two days afterwards he observed with some anxiety that the trend of the valley was inclining from northwards towards the point whence Sturt had turned back from his upward course on Cooper's Creek. As the second part of his instructions was to find a practicable road to the Gulf, he feared that he would not have sufficient provisions to fulfil both duties. He therefore made a stationary camp, and with two men proceeded down the river. But after two days' journey, he found that the Barcoo turned to the west, and even north of west. The channel now showed large reaches of water within its confines, some of them more than one hundred yards in width. This induced him to alter his plan, and he thought he should follow such an important watercourse and ascertain its outflow. He therefore turned back for the remainder of his party. On the 30th of August he discovered a large river coming from the North-North-East, and he named it the Thomson. With the usual inconsistency of Australian inland rivers, the Thomson soon presented another and different scene. The great pastoral stretches of the upper course were left behind, and were succeeded by flat and inferior country intersected by sand-ridges. The course of the river itself once more turned to the southward, and was but scantily watered. Still Kennedy persevered until convinced that further progress must bring him to Sturt's furthest on Cooper's Creek. The face of the land answered to Sturt's description; and grass and feed both beginning to fail him, Kennedy had to consider whether it was worth while risking the lives of his men to confirm what was practically a certainty. At last vistas of the desert, described by Sturt with such terrible fidelity, appeared stretching away to the horizon, and Kennedy turned back, satisfied that the Victoria River and Cooper's Creek were one and the same stream.
It was now Kennedy's intention to make an excursion towards the Gulf of Carpentaria. On his way down, in order to travel lighter, he had buried a large quantity of flour and sugar as well as his drays. When he arrived at the cache of provisions on his way back, he found that the natives had dug the rations up, and in mere wantonness had so mixed and scattered them as to render them useless. A little further on, he was just in time to save the carts, for an aboriginal was probing in the ground with a spear to ascertain their whereabouts. During this excursion Kennedy noticed that the blacks were given to "chewing tobacco in a green state;" but the "tobacco" was, of course, the pituri plant, which they are accustomed to masticate. By the time he reached the head of the Warrego, Kennedy was too short of provisions to attempt his projected Gulf expedition, and had to make homeward, but resolved to go down by that river and ascertain whether it joined the Darling or flowed westward.
The Warrego dividing into many dry channels when they reached its lower courses, the party struck eastward to the Culgoa, and reached that river after a very distressing stage over dry country on which they lost six horses from heat and thirst, whilst bringing the carts across it.
9.2. A TRAGIC EXPEDITION.
Kennedy's first experience of an independent exploring expedition in the west was by no means a fitting prelude to the tragic journey he next undertook. The same impulse that led to Mitchell's and Leichhardt's northern journeys stimulated Kennedy to make his dangerous journey up the eastern coast of the long peninsula that terminates in Cape York -- the desire to find a road to the north coast, so that an easy chain of communication should exist between the southern settlements and the far north.
It was at the end of the month of May that Kennedy landed at Rockingham Bay with his party of twelve men. He had started from Sydney in the barque Tam o' Shanter, which was convoyed by Captain Owen Stanley in the Alligator. This was in 1848, the same fateful year that witnessed Leichhardt's disappearance. A schooner was to meet the party on the north, at Port Albany, where it was proposed to form a settlement should the features of the peninsula warrant such an enterprise. In actual point of distance the task was not great, being a land traverse of from three to four hundred miles, allowing for deviations. But never were men in Australia so dogged by disaster and beset by danger as were Kennedy and his followers. Opposed by country as yet unfamiliar to them, they found their onward path hindered by many totally unforeseen conditions. Ranges and ravines clothed with an almost impenetrable jungle, which was infested with the venomous leaves of the stinging tree and the hooked spikes of the lawyer vine, confronted them. The land was densely populated with the most savage and relentless natives on the continent, who resented the invasion from the outset. Death tracked them steadily throughout, and claimed ten out of the thirteen of the devoted party as his victims.
The country through which their course lay is now dotted with mining-fields and townships, and fertile spaces of tilled tropical plantations. The coast-line rich in harbours is the busy haunt of steamers, and the narrow waterway between the mainland and the great barrier reef the home of many lightships. But when Kennedy and his party made their pioneer journey, the great desolation of the wilderness beset them on every side from the land, whilst the sea off-shore held myriad dangers.
Kennedy landed from the Tam o'Shanter at the little point that still bears the jovial name, and bade farewell to Owen Stanley in good spirits, and with no dread premonitions. He was fresh from the sun-scorched plains of the interior, and would confidently confront whatever might lie before him. Scrub and swampy country delayed him on his way to the higher land at the foot of the range, where he had hoped to find better travelling country; but the foothills were serried with ravines and gullies, and the sides clothed with the ever-present jungle. The horses and sheep, unaccustomed to the sour grasses of the coast lands of northern Australia, pined and rapidly wasted away. Their troubles were augmented by acts of annoyance, and on one unfortunate occasion, of open hostility on the part of the blacks.
By the 18th of July, a little over six weeks after they had left Rockingham Bay, the sheep had been reduced from one hundred to fifty, and the horses began to fail so rapidly that they had to abandon the carts, while the men were becoming completely exhausted from the endless cutting and hacking of the scrub. At length they surmounted the range, the backbone of the peninsula, and on the western slope, amid the heads of the rivers flowing into the Gulf of Carpentaria, made better progress. Kennedy, however, adhered to his instructions to examine the eastern slope, and recrossed the watershed, where troubles again came thick upon him. One after another the horses began to give in, and owing to the storekeeper's mismanagement, they were nearly out of provisions. On the 9th of December they reached Weymouth Bay, and Kennedy determined to form a stationary camp, and leaving there the main body of his men, push forward to Port Albany, whence he would send back the schooner that was awaiting them with relief. He selected seven men whom he left in charge of Carron, the naturalist, and with three men and the heroic Jacky-Jacky, an aboriginal of New South Wales, he pushed on -- to his death.
Before the departure the last sheep was slaughtered, and its lean and miserable carcase shared between the two parties; and with Carron, Kennedy ascended a hill that commanded a prospect of the country lying to the north, but could see nothing but rugged hills and black scrub. He confided only to Carron his gloomy foreboding that he would never reach Albany, so disheartened were both the men by the prospect. And throughout those long weeks of starvation that ensued, Carron refrained from crushing all hope in his comrades by communicating to them Kennedy's despair of relief.