Though now, after more than eighty years of discovery have
given us an intimate knowledge of the nature of the difficulties he would
have encountered, we may smile at the somewhat crude notions of the
daring navigator, we cannot refuse to recognise that a good deal of
thoroughness was mixed up with his plan, simple as it reads. An incursion
of five hundred miles north and south, respectively, would without doubt,
if possible, have done much towards an earlier knowledge of the interior.
His dream of sailing up a deep estuary--some great water way--leading to
more fertile lands than those of the coast inhabited by a superior race
of natives, had vanished. As the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria
rounded his course from south to west, and from west to north, so the
picture his fancy had painted faded; and he found himself compelled to
fall back upon the conception of a mode of transit patriarchal in its
simplicity.
He writes:--
"With five or six asses to carry provisions (and they can be obtained
here), expeditions might be made into the interior of Australia from the
head of the Gulph of Carpentaria in 18 deg.
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