Page:Journals of Several Expeditions Made in Western Australia.djvu/179

 rocky island east of Mount Gardener; about a quarter of a mile in its longest diameter, and about five hundred yards from the main land. Its shores are everywhere rocky; in many places inaccessible from the steepness, and in almost all, frcm the continued lashing of the surge of the waves which roll in from the ocean. The landing is attended with the least difficulty a short way round the N.W. end, and on the north aspect, but even here the surf is, at the best, considerable, and often highly dangerous. The surface, a few yards removed from the cliffs, is composed of a thin covering of light loam and mould, producing the anthociras obovata, and another shrub, with a few herbaceous plants, and affording a warren for sooty petrel, penguin, lizards, &c., which have riddled the ground with their holes. That seals have come up and been killed in considerable numbers at one time, is confirmed, in addition to oral information, by the skeletons which still remain; but none of the party saw any alive at this time, and there was only one path traced by them in the shrubbery. The sealers were therefore so far disappointed, but the profusion of petrel amply compensated, as upwards of five hundred of these birds were caught by three persons in less than three days.

The rock, which a protracted stay afforded me abundance of time to survey, is granite of almost every variety of texture and appearance. Still it seems different from the genuine granite of the more anciently known world. An oxydulated iron ore and iron pyrites are distributed through its mass in grains, and found in the veins in even larger portions, not, however, in sufficient quantity to repay the miner.

Rock and other fish are plentiful, and several