COASTS OP AUSTRALIA. 
193 
sioned the death of three of our turtles. At three I822. 
o’clock a breeze springing up from the westward, Jan. so. 
enabled us to steer to the northward, round the 
Montebello Islands, in doing which we saw 
nothing of Hermite Island, which the French 
have laid down as the westernmost island of that 
group. There is certainly no land to the west- 
ward of Trimouille Island ; and the error can 
only be accounted for by Captain Baudin’s hav- 
ing seen the latter at two different periods ; in- 
deed this conjecture is in some measure proved, 
since there is a considerable reef running off 
the north-west end of. that island, which in the 
French chart is attached to Hermite Island ; this 
reef might not have been seen by him at his first 
visit, and when he made the land again and ob- 
served , the reef, he must have concluded it to 
have been a second island. 
After steering a north course until seven o’clock, 
and deepening the water to sixty-five fathoms, we 
gradually hauled round the north end of the Mon- 
tebello Isles ; and at eleven p.m. steered East ; 
but at two o’clock, having decreased the depth 
from seventy-two to forty-one fathoms, we steered 
off to the northward until daylight, and then to 
the E.S.E., in order to anchor in the Mermaid’s 
Strait to the eastward of Malus Island, to take 
some stones on board as ballast, for the brig 
VoL. II. 0 
