, ill, fatigued, hunted by remorseless aborigines for days, and
finally speared to death by the natives of Cape York, when almost
within sight of his goal, where a vessel was waiting to succour him
and all his party. Only a black boy named Jacky Jacky was with him.
After Kennedy's death Jacky buried all his papers in a hollow tree,
and for a couple of days he eluded his pursuers, until, reaching the
spot where his master had told him the vessel would be, he ran yelling
down to the beach, followed by a crowd of murderous savages. By the
luckiest chance a boat happened to be at the beach, and the officers
and crew rescued the boy. The following day a party led by Jacky
returned to where poor Kennedy lay, and they buried him. They obtained
his books and maps from the tree where Jacky had hidden them. The
narrative of this expedition is heart-rending. Of the whole number of
the whites, namely seven, two only were rescued by the vessel at a
place where Kennedy had formed a depot on the coast, and left four
men.

With Captain Roe, a companion of King's, with whom he was speared and
nearly killed by the natives of Goulburn Island, in 1820, and who
afterwards became Surveyor-General of the colony of Western Australia,
the list of Australia's early explorers may be said to close, although
I should remark that Augustus Gregory was a West Australian explorer
as early as the year 1846. Captain Roe conducted the most extensive
inland exploration of Western Australia at that day, in 1848. No works
of fiction can excel, or indeed equal, in romantic and heart-stirring
interest the volumes, worthy to be written in letters of gold, which
record the deeds and the sufferings of these noble toilers in the dim
and distant field of discovery afforded by the Australasian continent
and its vast islands. It would be well if those works were read by the
present generation as eagerly as the imaginary tales of adventure
which, while they appeal to no real sentiment, and convey no solid
information, cannot compete for a moment with those sublime records of
what has been dared, done, and suffered, at the call of duty, and for
the sake of human interests by men who have really lived and died. I
do not say that all works of fiction are entirely without interest to
the human imagination, or that writers of some of these works are not
clever, for in one sense they certainly are, and that is, in only
writing of horrors that never occurred, without going t