Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/322

294 enjoyed, until sunset, when the fish suddenly left off biting. More than a hundred were obtained, varying in weight from ten to fifteen pounds each, and sufficient to serve for three or four good meals for the whole ship's company. They deserved their vernacular name by the eagerness with which they attacked the bait, and when hauled on board made a slight grunting noise, and emitted a peculiar and rather agreeable smell, somewhat like that of our English Smelt, only not so pronounced. The back-fins of numerous small Sharks could be seen above the surface of the water, and I noticed an enormous Turtle floating fast asleep just before the ship anchored.

We were to have resumed our voyage at sunrise the next morning, but the breeze was still very strong from the southward, and we remained at anchor. Early in the forenoon a boat was sent on shore to procure some sand, and I was by no means slow to avail myself of the opportunity of landing on this out-of-the-way island. The beach, on which there was little or no surf, was composed of fine yellow sand, broken at low-water mark by ledges of dead coral; and the first thing which struck me on commencing to ascend the cliffs—which were not particularly steep, but fatiguing to climb under the blazing Australian sun, owing to the deep loose sand which covered the slopes—was the much greater variety and the totally different character of the vegetation from what I had met with all along the coast to the northward and eastward as far as Port Darwin. I had evidently come within the boundary of the rich, varied, and most peculiar flora of South-Western Australia. Not, indeed, that there was any very great luxuriance, even the Eucalypti and Acacias, of which there were several species, being mere bushes not exceeding six or seven feet in height. Large clumps of a bright yellow "everlasting," diffusing a pleasant aromatic scent, grew at the base of the cliffs; and on their summits the general character of the vegetation was somewhat like that of an English heath, or still more like the varied growth on the open treeless waste lands in the south of Spain near Gibraltar, but almost every plant was entirely strange to me. Of animal life there was very little; I saw one Kangaroo-rat, a creature about the size of a Rabbit, and a few small Lizards. In places somewhat sheltered from the breeze two or three species of blue butterflies were flitting about