Vincent's Gulf, to see if the waters of Lake Alexandrina, the
termination of the Murray, had an outlet in the Gulf. Being unsuccessful
he crossed the range and paid a visit to the lake. Anxious to obtain some
bearings, he swam across the channel connecting the lake with the sea in
order to ascend the sandhills on the opposite side. His companions
watched him take several bearings from the top of the hill, descend out
of view on the other side, and he was never seen again. One of the
sealers from Kangaroo Island interrogated the blacks by means of a native
woman of the island, who could speak broken English, and her account was
that Barker met three natives as he descended the sand dune, who attacked
and speared him, unarmed and naked as he was, and then cast his body in
the breakers. These natives were of the same tribes that showed such
determined hostility to Sturt when he first found the lake.
Although Sturt himself felt confident that the junction of the Murray and
Darling were satisfactorily proved by what he saw on his famous boat
excursion, he had not convinced all of the public. Major Mitchell, for
one, had an entirely different theory on the subject embracing the
existence of a.
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