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Rh movements and partially incapacitated me during the final stages of the journey. Horses died of starvation or poison, and the men of the party were running perilously short of food the journey having been prolonged beyond our calculations when we reached Somerset on 3rd April, 1880.

Kennedy's maps and journals (1848) perished with him, and what we know of his expedition is taken (as far north as the Pascoe River) from the narrative written by William Carron, one of the three survivors, and (north of the Pascoe) from the "statement" of the black boy Jackey-Jackey, another of the survivors and the only one of the thirteen men to make the complete journey from Rockingham Bay to Somerset. The Geological and Prospecting Party's route only coincided for a short distance, from the head of the Jardine River to its westward bend, with that of the Jardine Brothers (1865). Day after day, during the whole of my journey, I was mapping the mountain ranges, rivers and other features of the country, checking my latitudes by star-observations whenever the night sky was clear enough, and as far as charting was concerned we were in virgin ground.

My report on the two expeditions was completed at my Townsville office in the winter of 1880 and sent to the Minister for Mines, Brisbane, with the relative map, which had taken a good deal of time, subject to interruptions by other duties. The report was printed and officially issued on I4th September, 1881, without my having had any opportunity of seeing it through the press, and to my astonishment the map—which might have been supposed to be of the first importance—was omitted. What became of the map and of my "office copy" will be seen in Chapter LXVII. After the map had reached Brisbane and before my report was published, my map had been reduced to a smaller scale and embodied in official maps issued by the Department of Lands. In that form, however, my charting was open, in parts, to an interpretation which I could never have sanctioned.

In 1913, when I had been out of the government service for about fourteen years, and when for the first time some degree of leisure had begun to fall to my share, I commenced to prepare a revised and corrected issue of the report, with its map reconstructed from my notes, with the intention of offering it to the Government for republication (the report itself having been long out of print). Some progress had been made when my friend James Dick, of Cooktown, sent me proofs of a pamphlet in which he proposed to summarise the narrative of the Geological and Prospecting Expeditions. When I had gone over the proofs, correcting them only in so far as statements of fact were concerned, I fully realised how misleading my original narrative must have been, misprinted as it was, and unaccompanied by the map which