with his brother started sheep-farming. He was a born explorer,
however, and made several excursions into the surrounding untraversed
land, finding several geographical features, which still preserve the
names he gave them. In 1846 he organised an expedition along more
extended lines, intending to proceed far into the north-west and west.
After having over-looked the ground, he would then prepare another party
on a large scale to attempt the passage to the Swan River. He started in
July, but in September occurred the disaster which cut him off in the
flower of his promise. In his dying letter he describes how he saw a
beautiful bird, which he was anxious to obtain:--

"My gun being loaded with slugs in one barrel and ball in the other, I
stopped the camel to get at the shot belt, which I could not get without
his lying down.

"Whilst Mr. Gill was unfastening it, I was screwing the ramrod into the
wad over the slugs, standing close alongside of the camel. At this moment
the camel gave a lurch to one side, and caught his pack in the cock of my
gun, which discharged the barrel I was unloading, the contents of which
first took off the middle fingers of my right hand between the second and
third joints, and entered my left cheek by my lower jaw, knocking out a
row of teeth from my upper jaw."

His sufferings were agonising, but he was easy between the fearful
convulsions, and at the end of the third day after he had reached home,
whither his companions had succeeded in conveying him, he died without a
struggle.

12.2. CAPTAIN STURT.

Charles Sturt, whose name is so closely bound up with the exploration of
the Australian interior, had settled in the new colony which the South
Australians loyally maintain he had created by directing attention to the
outlet of the Murray. After a short re-survey of the river, from the
point where Hume crossed it to the junction of the Murray and
Murrumbidgee, which had been one of Mitchell's tasks, he re-entered civil
life under the South Australian Government. He was now married, and
settled on a small estate which he was farming, not far from Adelaide. In
1839 he became Surveyor-General, but in October of the same year he
exchanged this office for that of Commissioner of Lands, which he held
until 1843. In the following year he commenced his most arduous and
best-known journey, a journey that has made the names of Sturt's Stony
Desert and the Depot Glen known all over the world, and that