Carpentaria that they bear a great similarity to those experienced at the
same season on the North-West coast, near Depuch Island; and the
circumstance of the temperature being lowest when they were strongest
from the land is also the same. This was there supposed to have been
occasioned by the great radiation of heat from the land over which they
blew; but as the country at the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria is not of
a cold clayey nature, the idea is naturally suggested that there must be
a great extent of swampy ground in the interior, which strengthens the
opinion I have before expressed.

SUPPOSED ISLANDS.

After hoisting in the boats we shaped a course along the eastern shore of
the Gulf towards Booby Island. Our being obliged to return thither, for a
chronometric departure prevented our examining the middle of the upper
part of the Gulf, where, according to certain vague reports, there exist
islands. It is stated, for example, that after the south-west monsoon has
set in strongly, numbers of coconuts are thrown on the north-west shore
of the Gulf of Carpentaria. In the year 1839, moreover, a small proa was
driven off the coast of Timor Laut during the north-west monsoon. The
wind blowing hard drifted them to the South-East for three days and three
nights, when they came to a low island, with no traces of inhabitants,
and abounding in coconut trees, upon the fruit of which they lived until
the monsoon changed, when they sailed back to Timor Laut. Flinders, when
off Batavia River, on the North-East side of the Gulf, was led to suppose
that an island existed to seaward of him, from seeing some flocks of
geese coming from that direction one morning. Wilson, also, in his Voyage
round the World, speaks of the Macassar people reporting an island in the
Gulf of Carpentaria, with sandalwood growing on it.