Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/39

Rh vessel eventually reached an island, where they remained some time, but then removed to a small barren rock farther away, which rock we passed quite close. There they remained till they perished of starvation. When their remains were found, with them was a diary kept by Mrs. Watson, written with her blood, and in which she records from day to day their horrible sufferings in the burning heat on how her milk goes dry and that unsheltered rock her baby perishes, and how the Chinaman went mad and died of starvation—the record of most terrible sufferings, so nobly borne, set down in short words. When the diary was found and published, a wave of pity and grief, wonder and admiration, swept through all Australia. To see the spot made one shudder, but afraid to try and realise it all. A monument to this brave woman has been erected at Cooktown.

The blacks along that coast on the mainland, the unexplored Cape York Peninsula, are very dangerous and troublesome, and are reputed cannibals. So little is known of this part that the Captain told me that one day four sailors suddenly appeared at the Palmer Gold Fields, and being questioned as to where they had come from, amazed every one by saying they had been cast adrift at sea and their boat washed ashore at the mouth of a fine river, up which they sailed with the tide, landing at a short distance from the goldfields, though no one there had any idea of the existence of this river, and little dreamt there was such easy communication with the sea. It was, I think, the Kennedy River.

Off Cape Bathurst we passed close to the Channel Rock Lightship. We had a quantity of stores for her, but she refused to send her boat for them, there being too heavy a sea on. It must