On examining the camp, Eyre found that the two boys had carried off both double-barrelled guns, all the baked bread and other stores, and a keg of water. All they had left behind was a rifle, with the barrel choked by a ball jammed in it, four gallons of water, forty pounds of flour, and a little tea and sugar.
When he had time to think the matter over calmly, Eyre judged, from the position of the body, that Baxter must have been aroused by the two natives plundering the camp, and that, getting up hastily to stop them, he was immediately shot. His first care was to put his rifle into serviceable condition, and then, when morning broke, he hastened to leave the ill-omened place. It was impossible to bury the body of his murdered companion; one unbroken sheet of rock covered the surface of the country for miles in every direction. Well might Eyre write, many years afterwards:--
"Though years have now passed away since the enactment of this tragedy, the dreadful horrors of that time and scene are recalled before me with frightful vividness, and make me shudder even now when I think of them. A lifetime was crowded into those few short hours, and death alone may blot out the impressions they produced."
The two murderers followed the white man and boy during the first day, evading all Eyre's attempts to bring them to close quarters, and calling to the remaining boy, Wylie, who refused to go to them. They disappeared the next morning, and must have died miserably of thirst and starvation.
Seven days passed without a drop of water for the horses, before they reached the end of the line of cliffs, and providentially came to a native well amid the sand dunes. From this point water was more frequently obtained, and what wretched horses they had left showed feeble symptoms of renewed life. At last, when their rations were completely exhausted, they sighted a ship at anchor in Thistle Cove. She proved to be the Mississippi, commanded by Captain Rossitur, the whaler already referred to as the first foreign vessel to enter Port Lincoln; and once more Eyre had to give thanks for relief at a most critical moment.
For ten days, in the hospitable cabin of the French whaler, he forgot his sufferings, and regained some of his lost strength. Then, provided with fresh clothes and provisions, and with his horses freshly-shod, Eyre recommenced his weary pilgrimage, and, in July, 1841, arrived at his long-desired goal, King George's Sound.
In reflecting upon this painful march of Eyre's round the Great Bight, one feels an exceeding great pity that so much heroic suffering should have been spent on the execution of a purpose the fulfilment of which promised but little of economic value. The maritime surveys had fairly established the fact that no considerable creek or river found its way into the Southern Ocean, either in or about the Great Bight. Granted that the outflow of some of our large Australian rivers had been overlooked by the navigators, the local conditions were such as to render it virtually certain that any such omission was not made along this part of the south coast. Here there was to be found no fringe of low, mangrove-covered flats, studded with inlets and saltwater creeks, thus masking the entrance of a river. In some parts, a bold forefront of lofty precipitous cliffs, in others a clean-swept sandy shore, alone faced the ocean. Flinders, constantly on the alert as he was for anything resembling the formation of a river-mouth, would scarcely have been mistaken in his reading of such a coast-line. And the journey resulted in no knowledge of the interior, even a short distance back from the actual coast-line. The conjectures of a worn-out, starving man, picking his way painfully along the verge of the beach, were, in this respect, of little moment.
Eyre, however, won for himself well-deserved honour for courage and perseverance, in as exacting circumstances as ever beset a solitary explorer. The picture of the lonely man in his plundered camp bending over his murdered companion, separated from his fellow-men by countless miles of unwatered and untrodden waste, appeals resistlessly to our sympathies. But admiration of Eyre's good qualities has blinded many to his errors of judgment.
He was accorded a generous public welcome on his return to Adelaide, and was subsequently appointed Police Magistrate on the Murray, where his inland experience and knowledge of native character were of great service. When Sturt started on his memorable trip to the centre of Australia, Eyre accompanied his old friend some distance. But his activities were exercised in other fields than those of Australian exploration during his after life. He was Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of New Munster in New Zealand under Sir George Grey from 1848 to 1853, when that colony was divided into two provinces. He was afterwards Governor-General of Jamaica, where the active and energetic measures he took to crush the insurrection of 1865 incited a storm of opposition against him in certain quarters, and he played a leading part in the great constitutional cases of Philips v. Eyre, and The Queen v. Eyre. He died at Steeple Aston, in Oxfordshire, in 1906.