1827.] Terra Incognita. 253 



we went to sea again but single-handed ; for the G sailed when our 



misfortune happened. Long and tedious was the passage, and rough was 

 the sea, from Rio de Janeiro to Bass's Straits, which divide Van Dieman's 

 Land from New Holland ; but the gales off the Cape, and across the 

 great Indian Ocean, were not so tedious as the sailing along with a ridge 

 of low land in sight, never changing in appearance, and apparently 

 interminable. At length we reached " the Heads;" but Macquarrie 

 Tower was not then built, with its revolving lights ; and we lay-to till 

 next morning when we entered the finest harbour in the world ! 



The north and south Heads are right and left of the entrance to Port, 

 Jackson, and about a mile apart ; the former is a high and almost perpen- 

 dicular cliff; but the south head is comparatively low, and is the end of 

 a promontory that shelters the port from easterly gales. Immediately 

 within the entrance there is a mass of sunken rock, which appears above 

 water at flood tide only in insulated blocks one of which, being consi- 

 derably larger than any of the rest, the group is called the Sow and Pig*. 

 Passing between the Sow and Pigs, and the land which forms the south 

 head, it is about two miles to Bradley's-head, where this arm of the sea 

 changes from a south to a directly west course. 



It^was a bright unclouded summer morning, in the month of January, 

 when we passed this antipodal Scylla and Charybdis, and the ship had 

 just rounded Bradley's-head, when I went on deck to gaze with delight on 

 " land :" she was beating up for Sydney Cove, against the light land- 

 breeze of the Australian summer morn ; and, I suppose, with the tide 

 for she made way* I remember now with what anxiety I ran forward, 

 whenever the ship approached the north shore, which I felt confident she 

 must run upon, for she went so close when the " ready about," and 

 " helm's a-lee," of the pilot, threw her head to the wind, and then filled 

 her off for the sand-hills, and the intervening islands, which, in their 

 turn, we stood for. The first of them bears a thievish name Shark's 

 Island; the second is named after Cook's colleague Clerk's Island; 

 the next in the same line, and near Anson's Point, is the beautiful 

 and romantic island, called Garden Island : many a holiday afternoon 

 have I spent there, convoyed by Billy Blue, hunting five corners and 

 jebungs, and breaking oysters from the rocks, and fishing for bream and 

 mullet in the deep waters around it. About half way across, from Garden 

 Island to the north shore, is the little sterile rocky mound, which bears 

 the beggarly unpropitious name of Pinchgut; and in the highest point of 

 it, at the time I refer to, stood a gibbet, from which dangled " a mur- 

 derer's banes in gibbet aims." There it stood a standard that civilization 

 had erected, on reclaiming the territory from the hand of nature a sign- 

 post, with an appropriate sign, to this inn, " where the wicked cease from 

 troubling." Many were the stories I heard, in after-times, of the crimes 

 and of the punishment of the man whose bones hung there, and of the 

 marvellous things that were effected by his ghost, which mounted guard 

 every night by the gibbet-foot, till it was dismantled in the following reign. 

 I heard, too, many reasons for the name that the island bore ; and the 

 best-authenticated is to this effect. In the earliest years of the settlement, 

 when the little colony of marines and convicts guards and the guarded was 

 dependant for the necessaries of life, even to the bread they ate, on supplies 

 from Europe, it not unfrequently happened that all hands were on very 

 short allowance. On these occasions, the governor punished minor crimes 

 by banishment to this little island, and a still shorter allowance than was 

 given in the settlement whence it obtained the name it now bears. Just 



