188 
A VOYAGE TO 
[North Coast. 
1803. 
January. 
Thurs. 13. 
Friday 14. 
evening, and from the same cause not much progress was made to 
the westward next day ; but the land was better distinguished than 
before, and many straggling rocks and two islets were seen to lie 
off the north end of Groote Eylandt. In the morning of the 14th 
we weathered all these, and on the wind dying away, anchored in 
ni- fathoms, blue mud; the outer North-point Islet, which lies in 
13 0 37' south and 13b 0 45' east, then bore E. 3 0 S. five miles, and the 
furthest extreme of a higher cliffy island, S. 38° W. three miles. 
I went in a boat to this last island with the botanical gentle- 
men, intending to take bearings from the uppermost cliffs ; but the 
many deep chasms by which the upper parts are intersected, made 
it impossible to reach the top in the short time we had to spare, and 
a few bearings from the eastern low point were all that could be ob- 
tained. This was called Chasm Island ; it lies one mile and a half from 
a low point of Groote Eylandt, where the shore trends southward 
and seemed to form a bay, into which I proposed to conduct the ship. 
We found upon Chasm Island a fruit which proved to be a new 
species of eugenia, of the size of an apple, whose acidity of taste was 
agreeable; there were also many large bushes covered with nutmegs, 
similar to those seen at Cape Vanderlin ; and in some of the chasms 
the ground was covered with this fruit, without our being able, for 
some time, to know whence it came. Several trees shot up in these 
chasms, thirty or forty feet high, and on considering them attentively, 
these were found to be the trees whence the nutmegs had fallen ; 
thus what was a spreading bush above, became, from the necessity 
of air and light, a tall, slender tree, and showed the admirable power 
in nature to accommodate itself to local circumstances. The fruit was 
small, and not of an agreeable flavour ; nor is it probable that it can 
at all come in competition with the nutmeg of the Molucca Islands: 
it is the Myristica insipida of Brown’s Prodrom. Nov. Holl. p. 400. 
In the steep sides of the chasms were deep holes or caverns, 
undermining the cliffs ; upon the walls of which I found rude draw- 
ings, made with charcoal and something like red paint upon the 
