Early on the morning of December 3rd, we reached a secure anchorage between Three Hummock Island, and Hunter, formerly called Barren Island; and we had every reason to be thankful at finding ourselves in such a snug berth, for during our stay, we experienced gales from east and west, with such sudden changes that no ship could have saved herself. This made us sensible how necessary it was to choose anchorages sheltered from both winds. Our surveying operations were sadly delayed by this boisterous weather.
Three Hummock Island receives its name from three peaks rising on its eastern side. The south rises abruptly from the water and forms a singular sugarloaf 790 feet high. It is composed of granite, boulders of which front many of the points, forming strange figures. The whole of the island is clothed with an almost impervious scrub, which growing laterally forms a perfect network, so that it is impossible to traverse it. Mr. Bynoe procured few specimens of birds in consequence. The woodcutters one day cut a small brown opossum in half: it seemed to be a very rare if not a new animal; but unfortunately the head part could not be found. Small brown rats were very numerous, they had rather short tails with long hind feet, and sat up like kangaroos.
The trees on this island are small and stunted, being chiefly Banksia and Eucalypti. Water is plentiful. We supplied the ship from wells dug on the north point of a sandy bay on the South-East side of the island.*
(*Footnote. The reef that so nearly sealed the Mermaid's fate with Captain King, we found to lie half a mile north-west from the north-east end of Three Hummock Island.)
BARREN ISLAND.
Hunter Island well deserves its former name of Barren, for it is perfectly treeless; a green kind of scrub overruns its surface, which at its highest point is three hundred feet above the level of the sea. In form it is like a closed hand with the fore-finger extended, pointing north. The inclination of its strata differs, dipping to the sea on both sides, east and west. These at first sight appeared to be of the same kind of sandstone that we had seen so much of on the North-West coast, but on closer inspection I found they were raised beaches; the prevailing mass of the island was a granitoid rock.
THE BLACK PYRAMID.
From stations on Hunter Island we were enabled to determine the positions of the numerous dangers fronting its west or seaward side, and also that of a dark mass of rock, 250 feet high, appropriately named the Black Pyramid, lying 16 miles West by North from the centre of the island, and in latitude 40 degrees 28 minutes South which places it nearly five miles south of its position in the old charts. It is quite a finger-post to this entrance of the Strait, and all ships should pass close to it. When I looked at these islands and rocks I could not help thinking of poor Captain Flinders and his enterprising companion Mr. Bass, the discoverers of the north-western part of Tasmania. What a thrill of excitement must have shot through their frames when on rounding Hunter Island, in the little Norfolk cutter, they first felt the long swell of the ocean and became convinced of the insular character of Tasmania! This discovery must have amply repaid them for all their toils and privations. Nothing indeed is so calculated to fill the heart of the navigator with pride, as the consciousness that he has widened the sphere of geographical science, and added new seas and new lands to the known world.
The south end of Hunter Island is about three miles from a point of the mainland, called Woolnorth; but from the rocks and inlets that encumber the passage and the rapid rush of the tide it is only navigable for small vessels with great caution. Point Woolnorth is a rather low sloping point composed of the same rock as Hunter Island. Ten miles south of it a raised beach again occurs 100 feet above the level of the sea. Behind Point Woolnorth the country swells into hills nearly six hundred feet high. Three miles from its extreme is an out-station of the Van Diemen's Land Agricultural Company, of which I shall say more anon. Some forty persons are here located under the care of a German, who amused himself by making a large collection of insects, which he has since taken to Germany. The soil on this extremity of Tasmania is most productive; but much labour is required in clearing for the purposes of cultivation. From thence to Circular Head, bearing East 1/2 South 26 miles, the shore is low and sinuous, forming three shallow bights.
WALKER ISLAND.