|
"Soon after landing the weather became very foggy, and the wind increased to a heavy gale.
The cliffs at our encampment consisted of slate-clay, and bituminous alum-slate, and were
six hundred feet high. The river, whose mouth we passed, ran close behind them, having a
course parallel to the coast for some miles before it makes its way to the sea. It was
named Wilmot Horton River, in honour of the Under Secretary of State for the Colonial
Department. Its breadth is about three hundred yards, and it seems, from the quantity of
drift-timber that was piled on the shoals at its mouth, to flow through a wooded country.
[...] At high-water, which took place at a quarter past four in the afternoon, the small slip of beach on which we had encamped was almost covered, and we had to pile the baggage on the shelving cliff. A very showy species of gromwell grew near our encampment, in company with the common seagromwell, (lithospermum maritimum.)." |
