Page:Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.djvu/71

 get any good bark to protect us from the rain; and when the rain did at length cease, we were surrounded by the densest crowds of musquitos I had ever before met with. Miles, the stockman, narrowly escaped injuring his hand here, as he thoughtlessly discharged a horse pistol with the swivel ramrod remaining in the barrel.

March 15th.—The sun rose in an unclouded sky this morning. We arrived, in the middle of the day, at my tents near Woollombucca creek, where I had left my surveying party. I here made a vigorous inroad into a mess of salt beef and peas, which my tent-keeper had prepared for his own dinner, and revived my horse with a good feed of maize; after which I rode on to our cattle station, and rewarded the blacks with the promised red shirts, and a large supply of tobacco and pipes.

In the year 1842, I determined to ascertain whether the Bellengen river was navigable, and to examine the country round its mouth; as I intended, if the land was well adapted for grazing, to form a cattle station there.

About that time the blacks, from the sources of the Nambucca and the Bellengen, had committed several outrages on the sawyers, who had lately proceeded to the former river to cut cedar. One lawyer had been murdered most cruelly by the savages, who attacked him and his companion whilst felling a tree. When his body was found, it was