s
of Cape Grim to the scrub-encircled barrenness of Sandy Cape, and
the frowning entrance to Macquarie Harbour, the nature of the country
entirely changes. Along that iron-bound shore, from Pyramid Island and
the forest-backed solitude of Rocky Point, to the great Ram Head, and
the straggling harbour of Port Davey, all is bleak and cheerless. Upon
that dreary beach the rollers of the southern sea complete their circuit
of the globe, and the storm that has devastated the Cape, and united in
its eastern course with the icy blasts which sweep northward from the
unknown terrors of the southern pole, crashes unchecked upon the Huon
pine forests, and lashes with rain the grim front of Mount Direction.
Furious gales and sudden tempests affright the natives of the coast.
Navigation is dangerous, and the entrance to the "Hell's Gates" of
Macquarie Harbour--at the time of which we are writing (1833), in the
height of its ill-fame as a convict settlement--is only to be attempted
in calm weather. The sea-line is marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks
are dismally named after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is
chill and moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and
noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close
to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face
of nature is stamped a perpetual frown. The shipwrecked sailor, crawling
painfully to the summit of basalt cliffs, or the ironed convict,
dragging his tree trunk to the edge of some beetling plateau, looks down
upon a sea of fog, through which rise mountain-tops like islands; or
sees through the biting sleet a desert of scrub and crag rolling to the
feet of Mount Heemskirk and Mount Zeehan--crouched like two sentinel
lions keeping watch over the seaboard.

CHAPTER II. THE SOLITARY OF "HELL'S GATES".

"Hell's Gates," formed by a rocky point, which runs abruptly northward,
almost touches, on its eastern side, a projecting arm of land which
guards the entrance to King's River. In the middle of the gates is a
natural bolt--that is to say, an island-which, lying on a sandy bar in
the very jaws of the current, creates a double whirlpool, impossible
to pass in the smoothest weather. Once through the gates, the convict,
chained on the deck of the inward-bound vessel, sees in front of him the
bald cone of the Frenchman's Cap, piercing the moist air at a height of
five thousand feet; while, gloomed by overhangin