mortality from scurvy, are unfavourable conditions for seeing anything in a cheerful light; beside which it does not seem clear that the French ever penetrated to any considerable distance from the shore.
The descriptive sketch which the English explorers wrote of the new land was filled up in highly-coloured detail by the imagination of their readers, and the bar at the entrance of the river Swan, which Captain Stirling ascertained to consist of four hundred and eighty yards of limestone, with four fathoms of water on either side, was expected to drop piecemeal before the progress of civilization. The 'Annual Register' of 1828 suggests that "when a town begins to spring up upon the banks of the Swan, and substantial buildings are required, the use of the bar as a stone-quarry for architectural purposes will go far to defray the cost of removing it."
The point upon which Captain Stirling's impressions appear to have been widest of the mark was in his supposing that Western Australia was abundantly supplied with fresh water; and his observation, that the tracing of a channel in the sand with the finger would be followed by trickling drops, can only be accounted for by an unusual quantity of rain having immediately preceded his arrival, and also by the winter of the year before having been immoderately wet. Experience has proved, however, that Captain Stirling's encomiums on the West Australian climate were not exaggerated, and that his judgment was also correct in pronouncing Cockburn Sound to be the best and safest anchorage in the vicinity of the river Swan.
Cockburn Sound lies a few miles westward of Fremantle between the mainland and Garden Island, which
