parts he had reached. He was fully prepared to come upon an inland
sea, for he carried a boat on a bullock waggon for hundreds of miles,
and when he finally abandoned it he writes: "Here we left the boat
which I had vainly hoped would have ploughed the waters of an inland
sea." Several years afterwards I discovered pieces of this boat, built
of New Zealand pine, in the debris of a flood about twenty miles down
the watercourse where it had been left. A great portion, if not all
the country, explored by that expedition is now highly-prized pastoral
land, and a gold field was discovered almost in sight of a depot
formed by Sturt, at a spot where he was imprisoned at a water hole for
six months without moving his camp. He described the whole region as a
desert, and he seems to have been haunted by the notion that he had
got into and was surrounded by a wilderness the like of which no human
being had ever seen or heard of before. His whole narrative is a tale
of suffering and woe, and he says on his map, being at the furthest
point he attained in the interior, about forty-five miles from where
he had encamped on the watercourse he called Eyre's Creek, now a
watering place for stock on a Queensland cattle run: "Halted at sunset
in a country such as I verily believe has no parallel upon the earth's
surface, and one which was terrible in its aspect." Sturt's views are
only to be accounted for by the fact that what we now call excellent
sheep and cattle country appeared to him like a desert, because his
comparisons were made with the best alluvial lands he had left near
the coast. Explorers as a rule, great ones more particularly, are not
without rivals in so honourable a field as that of discovery, although
not every one who undertakes the task is fitted either by nature or
art to adorn the chosen part. Sturt was rivalled by no less celebrated
an individual than Major, afterwards Sir Thomas, Mitchell, a soldier
of the Peninsula War, and some professional jealousy appears to have
existed between them.