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I should but weary you to dwell day by day upon the passage of time that Sweers and I passed upon this ship that we had seen upon the ice. We kept an eager look-out for craft, crawling to the mastheads so as to obtain a view over the blocks of ice which lay in masses at the stem and stern of the whaler.
Sweers, "for the man who can discover anything about Sir John Franklin and his party." The captain grinned and quickly grew grave.
The adventure yielded Sweers and I a thousand pounds apiece as salvage money, but we were kept waiting a long time before receiving our just reward.
On duly weighing these considerations in my mind I determined to make an accurate survey of this anchorage, including Sweers and the eastern portion of Bentinck Island; and to despatch two boats to examine the group of islands to the north-west, and the mainland from thence to abreast of the south-west end of Bentinck Island. On the morning of the 9th, accordingly, Messrs.
The decks were dry, and on my kicking a coil of rope that was near my feet the stuff did not crackle, as one could have expected, as though frosted to the core. "The vessel seems to have been thawed through," said I, "and I expect that this berg is only a fragment of the mass that broke adrift with her." "Likely enough," said Sweers. "Hark! what is that?" "What do you hear?" I exclaimed.
It was then a morning that brought the first of May within a biscuit-toss of our reckoning of time: a very cold morning, the sea flat, green, and greasy, with a streaking of white about it, as though it were a flooring of marble; there was wind but no lift in the water; and Salamon Sweers, in whose watch I was, said to me, when the day broke and showed us the look of the ocean: "Blowed," said he, "if a man mightn't swear that we were under the lee of a range of high land."
I tasted the water; it was rain and without the least flavour of salt: and, after drinking heartily, I filled the pannikin afresh and carried it down to Sweers. There was a spiritlessness in this man that surprised me.
I also resolved to ascertain if the supply of water that Flinders found on Sweers Island was still to be obtained; and on our way thither determined on visiting Bountiful Islands, where we arrived accordingly on the morning of the 6th. The greatest depth we had in crossing the Gulf was 15 fathoms, the nature of the bottom being a fine dark sandy mud.
We strained our sight, but no faintest blotch of shadow could we distinguish amid the white water rushing smoothly off from the base of the berg, and streaming into the pallid shadow of the squall where you saw the sea clear of the ice beginning to work with true Atlantic spite. "Crate Cott!" cried Sweers, "what's to be done? There was no appearance of a squall when we landed here.
They were as large as those seen in the neighbourhood of Port Phillip, but much browner. The other birds, most common, will be found in an extract from the game book, given in a future page. We saw no animals, except some large iguanas. Investigator Road is sheltered to the northward by shoal water stretching across between Sweers and Bentinck islands.
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