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One of the ships that had accompanied Cook on his second voyage had made a rough survey of Van Diemen's Land, and had come to the conclusion that it joined on to the mainland.
This was in March; and I would advise ships bound from India to New South Wales, in the month of January, February, or March, to go to the southward of Van Diemen's Land altogether: they will thus carry the strong westerly winds longer, avoid the easterly gales that blow during these months in Bass's Straits, and probably shorten their passage ten or twelve days.
Good figure what Lord Dundreary would call "dem robust," but not so sumptuous as to be merely ornamental; tolerably convenient figure to get about in. Walks up and down, man-fashion, with her hands behind her back also man-fashion. Such is Mrs. Maria Stanley, the sister of Clara Van Diemen's father, and best known to Clara as Aunt Maria.
Subsequently, however, he was detected, and received sentence of transportation for seven years. He underwent this sentence, and an additional one in Van Diemen's Land, chiefly at Port Arthur, the most severe of the penal stations there. During three months, they underwent the most extreme hardships from hunger and exposure.
Indeed, the convict was entirely inferential, and had no foundation except in the fact that the old woman's son had been born at Macquarie Harbour. Uncle Mo's impression that Van Diemen's Land was a sort of plague-spot on the planet the bacilli of the plague being convicted criminals was no doubt too well grounded.
"Yes," we said all together, studying him the while. "Yes, this is Van Diemen's Avenue." "Thanks," he replied, and withdrew his foot from our bottom step. It seemed as though he was about to depart and leave us guessing, when he spoke again. "Perhaps you know the house I want," he said. "Carville's the name. I," he added as if in an afterthought, "am Mr. Carville."
He was obliged to lean on Van Diemen's assertion, that he had not robbed and had not murdered, to be comforted by the belief that he was not once a notorious bushranger, or a defaulting manager of mines, or any other thing that is naughtily Australian and kangarooly. He sat at the dinner-table at Elba, eating like the rest of mankind, and looking like a starved beggarman all the while.
The object of the intruders was to get rid of Captain Bligh as well as they could, and accordingly he was sent off to England in command of the Porpoise, but he remained from March to December, 1809, off the coast of Van Diemen's Land, daily expecting despatches from the home government, until at last, on December 28th, his intended successor, Colonel Macquarie, arrived at Sydney.
My intention was to reach, if possible, one of those islands, which, I had reason to believe, lay to the northeast of Van Diemen's Land. I discovered nothing all that day; but upon the next, about three o'clock in the afternoon, when I had, by my computation, made twenty-four leagues from Blefuscu, I descried a sail steering to the southeast: my course was due east.
By our Longitude we are a degree to the Westward of the East side of Van Diemen's Land, according to Tasman, the first discoverer's, Longitude of it, who could not err much in so short a run as from this land to New Zeland; and by our Latitude we could not be above 50 or 55 Leagues to the Northward of the place where he took his departure from. THURSDAY, 19th.
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