ere sadly delayed by this boisterous
weather.

Three Hummock Island receives its name from three peaks rising on its
eastern side. The south rises abruptly from the water and forms a
singular sugarloaf 790 feet high. It is composed of granite, boulders of
which front many of the points, forming strange figures. The whole of the
island is clothed with an almost impervious scrub, which growing
laterally forms a perfect network, so that it is impossible to traverse
it. Mr. Bynoe procured few specimens of birds in consequence. The
woodcutters one day cut a small brown opossum in half: it seemed to be a
very rare if not a new animal; but unfortunately the head part could not
be found. Small brown rats were very numerous, they had rather short
tails with long hind feet, and sat up like kangaroos.

The trees on this island are small and stunted, being chiefly Banksia and
Eucalypti. Water is plentiful. We supplied the ship from wells dug on the
north point of a sandy bay on the South-East side of the island.*

(*Footnote. The reef that so nearly sealed the Mermaid's fate with
Captain King, we found to lie half a mile north-west from the north-east
end of Three Hummock Island.)

BARREN ISLAND.

Hunter Island well deserves its former name of Barren, for it is
perfectly treeless; a green kind of scrub overruns its surface, which at
its highest point is three hundred feet above the level of the sea. In
form it is like a closed hand with the fore-finger extended, pointing
north. The inclination of its strata differs, dipping to the sea on both
sides, east and west. These at first sight appeared to be of the same
kind of sandstone that we had seen so much of on the North-West coast,
but on closer inspection I found they were raised beaches; the prevailing
mass of the island was a granitoid rock.

THE BLACK PYRAMID.

From stations on Hunter Island we were enabled to determine the positions
of the numerous dangers fronting its west or seaward side, and also that
of a dark mass of rock, 250 feet high, appropriately named the Black
Pyramid, lying 16 miles West by North from the centre of the island, and
in latitude 40 degrees 28 minutes South which places it nearly five miles
south of its position in the old charts. It is quite a finger-post to
this entrance of the Strait, and all ships should pass close to it. When
I looked at these islands and rocks I could not help thinking of poor
Captain Flinders and his enterprising compani