were off again, and as the weather continued beautifully fine we made
splendid progress.

One evening a few days after the storm, as we were placidly paddling
away, I saw Yamba's face suddenly brighten with a look I had never seen
on it before, and I felt sure this presaged some extraordinary
announcement. She would gaze up into the heavens with a quick, sudden
motion, and then her intelligent eyes would sparkle like the stars above.
I questioned her, but she maintained an unusual reserve, and, as I
concluded that she knew instinctively we were approaching Port Darwin, I,
too, felt full of joy and pleasure that the object of our great journey
was at length about to be achieved. Alas! what awaited me was only the
greatest of all the astounding series of disappointments--one indeed so
stunning as to plunge me into the very blackest depths of despair.

Yamba still continued to gaze up at the stars, and when at length she had
apparently satisfied herself upon a certain point, she turned to me with
a shout of excited laughter and delight, pointing frantically at a
certain glowing star. Seeing that I was still puzzled by her merriment,
she cried, "That star is one you remember well." I reflected for a
moment, and then the whole thing came to me like a flash of lightning.
_Yamba was approaching her own home once more_--_the very point from
which we had both started eighteen months previously_! In the storm, as
I have already said, we had passed Port Darwin altogether, having been
driven out to sea.

I tell you, my heart nearly burst when I recalled the awful privations
and hardships we had both experienced so recently; and when I realised
that all these things had been absolutely in vain, and that once more my
trembling hopes were to be dashed to the ground in the most appalling
manner, I fell back into the canoe, utterly crushed with horror and
impotent disappointment. Was there ever so terrible an experience? Take
a map of Australia, and see for yourself my frightful blunder--mistaking
the west coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria for the eastern waters of the
Cape York Peninsula, and then blindly groping northward and westward in
search of the settlement of Somerset, which in reality lay hundreds of
miles north-east of me. I was unaware of the very existence of the great
Gulf of Carpentaria. But were it not for having had to steer north to
get out of the waterless plains, I might possibly have reached the north-
ea