gle was turning out between the heads.* I cannot for the last time bid
adieu to a place, which had become to us as it were a second home,
without once more alluding to the reception I had experienced from its
inhabitants. To enumerate any particular instances would be invidious;
space forbids me to pay due acknowledgments to all. In general,
therefore, I must say, that every attention which kindness and
hospitality could suggest, was paid to the officers of the Beagle, and a
debt of gratitude accumulated which it will be difficult to repay.

(*Footnote. It is worthy of mention, that vessels working in against the
ebb-tide, should get close under the inner south head before making a
board across the entrance, as the stream sets round the north head a knot
an hour to the northward, but has a southerly direction from one to two
miles off.)

Fresh easterly winds in the first instance, and light northerly ones
latterly, carried us rapidly to the southward, and towards midnight of
the 21st, we crossed the parallel of 39 degrees 31 minutes South,*
steering South by West 1/2 West.

(*Footnote. In this latitude a shoal was reported to have been seen by a
vessel bound to Sydney, from Banks Strait, in 1838. The master of her
states, that he sounded on it in seven fathoms, and saw moored kelp
occupying the space of about half a mile. As this vessel's latitude, by
her run from Banks Strait, was twenty miles further south, we cannot
place much confidence in this report, in which it is stated, that when
Cape Barren bore West eight miles, they steered North-East for sixty
miles, when finding themselves, near noon, close to broken water, they
wore the vessel's head round to the southward, and sounded in seven
fathoms in kelp; the latitude by observation being 39 degrees 31 minutes
South. As it was blowing strong at the time from the North-West with a
high sea, and as there was only one cast of the lead taken, in the
confusion of wearing, it is possible they might have been deceived. The
kelp might have been adrift, and the sea, in that neighbourhood, often
breaks irregularly as if on foul ground. The position of this supposed
shoal, by the run from Banks Strait would be, latitude 39 degrees 51
minutes South, longitude 149 degrees 40 minutes East; but as this gives a
difference of twenty miles in the latitude by observation, and as the
Beagle has crossed those parallels ten times between the meridians of 148
degrees 4 minutes and 150 d