only desire to be able to procure the necessaries of life, I wish to devote myself to this people."
The letter was backed by good names and good words. He was successful. The salary was to be 100l., with rations for one person. The scheme was ridiculed, and the man was denounced as a mad enthusiast; but as he said himself once at a public meeting, "I would not give a fig for a man who enters upon any enterprise of moment, unless he possesses some enthusiasm." In very truth, he would want all his soon.
Bruni Island, so called from Admiral Bruni D'Entrecasteaux, lies between the channel and Storm Bay, and extends to the south-westward for fifty miles. South Bruni, in which Cook's Adventure Bay is situated, is nearly separated from North Bruni: a low, narrow neck of land unites the two. South Bruni, at the time of our story, was uninhabited. Upon the northern portion were the salt works of Mr. Roberts, and a few farms. The land generally is unfit for cultivation, and the sparse vegetation affords little advantage to pastoral pursuits. Belonging to the carboniferous and silurian systems of the main opposite, the place bears the record of subsequent and long-continued igneous action. The rocky coast exposed to the southern ocean is much torn and battered by the ever-boiling billows, and is carefully shunned by the mariner. Even upon the inner side, the access is often difficult from the frequent and sudden storms which rush up the channel. A fantastic pile of lofty cliffs of basalt has been cut off from the island by the surging sea, and now stands, as the southern Bruni bulwarks, to receive the onset of the Antarctic currents, and break their crests. The whole island, from its deep indentations, exhibits the mark of such violent and long-sustained oceanic assaults, that it seems but to require a few charges more to destroy its unity of structure, and to reduce it to some straggling islets in a seething sea.
In a little cove, on the western and inner side of Bruni, and two miles from the northernmost point, called by the French Expedition Cap de la Sortie, the Black station had to be formed.
Thirty years of suffering had passed away when I last looked into that place of settlement. The avenger and his victim had alike disappeared. The neophyte of civilization and the red-handed savage slept beneath the fallen leaves of the forest. I
