s
Batman, and each man pegged out a farm of only one hundred acres.
These farms were very valuable in the days of the late boom, and are
called the city of Melbourne. Batman wanted to oust the newcomers;
he claimed the farms under his grant from the Jagga-Jaggas. He
squatted on Batman's Hill, and looked down with evil eyes on the
rival immigrants. He saw them clearing away the scrub along Flinders
Street, and splitting posts and rails all over the city from Spencer
Street to Spring Street, regardless of the fact that the ground under
their feet would be, in the days of their grandchildren, worth 3,000
pounds per foot. Their bullock-drays were often bogged in Elizabeth
Street, and they made a corduroy crossing over it with red gum logs.
Some of these logs were dislodged quite sound fifty years afterwards
by the Tramway Company's workmen.

DISCOVERY OF THE RIVER HOPKINS.

"Know ye not that lovely river?
Know ye not that smiling river?
Whose gentle flood, by cliff and wood,
With 'wildering sound goes winding ever."

In January, 1836, Captain Smith, who was in charge of the whaling
station at Port Fairy, went with two men, named Wilson and Gibbs, in
a whale boat to the islands near Warrnambool, to look for seal. They
could find no seal, and then they went across the bay, and found the
mouth of the river Hopkins. In trying to land there, their boat
capsized in the surf, and Smith was drowned. The other two men
succeeded in reaching the shore naked, and they travelled back along
the coast to Port Fairy, carrying sticks on their shoulders to look
like guns, in order to frighten away the natives, who were very
numerous on that part of the coast. On this journey they found the
wreck of a vessel, supposed to be a Spanish one, which has since been
covered by the drifting sand. When Captain Mills was afterwards
harbour master at Belfast, he took the bearings of it, and reported
them to the Harbour Department in Melbourne. Vain search was made
for it many years afterwards in the hope that it was a Spanish
galleon laden with doubloons.

Davy was in the Sydney trade in the 'Elizabeth' until March, 1836; he
then left her and joined the cutter 'Sarah Ann', under J. B. Mills,
to go whaling at Port Fairy. In the month of May, Captain Mills was
short of boats, and went to the Hopkins to look for the boat lost by
Smith. He took with him two boats with all their whaling gear, in
case he should see a whale. David Ferma