ONE OF AUSTRALIA'S PIONEERS.





PREFACE.


The objects for which the Lady Nelson's voyages were undertaken render
her logbooks of more than ordinary interest. She was essentially an
Australian discovery ship and during her successive commissions she was
employed exclusively in Australian waters. The number of voyages that she
made will perhaps never be accurately known, but her logbooks in
existence testify to the important missions that she accomplished. The
most notable are those which record early discoveries in Victoria: the
exploration of the Queensland coast: the surveys of King Island and the
Kent Group: the visits to New Zealand and the founding of settlements at
Hobart, Port Dalrymple, and Melville Island. Seldom can the logbooks of a
single ship show such a record. Their publication seemed very necessary,
for the handwriting on the pages of some of them is so faded that it is
already difficult to decipher, and apparently only the story of Grant's
voyages and the extracts from Murray's log published by Labilliere in the
Early History of Victoria have ever before been published. In
transcription I have somewhat modernized the spelling where old or
incorrect forms tended to obscure the sense, and omitted repetitions, as
it would have been impossible to include within the limits of one volume
the whole of the contents of the logbooks. The story of the Lady Nelson
as told by Grant has in places been paraphrased, for he sometimes writes
it in diary form under date headings and at others he inserts the date in