Читать книгу Memoir and Journal of an Expedition Organized by the Colonial - Henry Maxwell Lefroy - Страница 7

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A large number of settlers of York and its vicinity, for the most part personal friends of my own, others warmly interested in the objects of the Expedition, accompanied us many miles of our first day's journey; in many cases rendering much required assistance in leading, driving, and re-adjusting the packs and gear on our 16 horses, of which some were only partially broken in, all were new to each other, to ourselves, to their work as pack-horses, and to the new and not always well-fitting gear with which they were entrapped; whilst we, on our part, were inexperienced in the proper adjusting of their gear, and the most convenient distribution of the very bulky and heavy burdens with which they started; but with their ready and vigorous assistance in each emergency during the 10 or 12 first miles of our journey through which they accompanied us, we got on without any disaster or delay worthy of record, and at about 8 p.m., or two hours after sunset, reached Ben Coolen, a gully distant from York about 25 miles, at which the driver of our forage had been directed to leave one night's ration for our horses.

We were annoyed rather than surprised to find the heavily laden cart, which was to convey to Mr Smith's station a portion of the equipment and the forage for our horses, had, in two days' journey, completed only 25 miles; but the heaviness of the load, together with the soft state of the track after the recent heavy rains, was a sufficient reason for this result; the settler who supplied the dray, at a charge of £12 for the journey to Mr Smith's station, doing much more than he had engaged to do, by accompanying the dray himself to assist the regular driver, and by supplying 4 horses instead of 3, as contracted for, and throughout the journey sparing no exertions of himself or horses to reach Mr Smith's station as speedily as possible.

The reaching our first night's camping ground so late as 8 p.m., when it happened to be a particularly dark night, and the saturated state of the ground on which we camped, due to the late rains, formed an effective but by no means agreeable introduction to our subsequent bush life and labors; but by virtue of the fatigue, both mental and bodily, which we had undergone through this and the seven days of our preparations at York, and cheered by the agreeable society and ever prompt services of Mr L. Bayly, the Government Resident of York, we at length got over the not easy task of unloading and unsaddling, in the dark, so many wild and frightened horses for the first time; tying them up to separate trees, so that they could hurt neither themselves nor each other; giving them their forage, &c., many of them being so wild and frightened that to get a nosebag secured to the head of one of these was a labor of no small difficulty, if not of peril. All this accomplished, we found leisure to eat our supper, for which we had earned a good appetite, and soon therefore were sleeping soundly on the wet ground, not using our tents, which we were too tired to put up.

I may here record that the first, and, as it eventually proved, nearly the only untoward disaster of our Expedition, occurred this morning, involving the loss of one of the two horses which I had supplied for the use of the Expedition. It happened as follows:—

To prevent as far as possible any unavoidable delay in the starting of the Expedition this morning, which, from the untrained and imperfectly broken state of the horses, and from the hurriedness of our preparations generally, I anticipated would prove a somewhat troublesome and slow business, I had directed all the new tether ropes to be attached to the horses' necks the previous evening. The mare in question was secured to the stall, not by her tether rope, which was merely coiled round her neck, and there made fast, but by a headstall. The stiffness of the new rope, I suppose, galled her neck and caused her to raise her near hind leg to rub it when her near hind hoof got entangled in the coils of the rope, so that she could not withdraw it. She then fell back, breaking her halter, and in her efforts to release her foot, drew the coils of rope so tightly round her neck, that, at 4 a.m. this morning, when I left the house of my friend Dr. McCoy, at which I had slept, and which was distant from her stable nearly 300 yards, for the purpose of making all the preparations for our starting, I distinctly heard her violent snortings and breathings, and when I reached Mr Parker's yard I found her so nearly suffocated that, although alive at the hour of our starting from York, she died about noon. Unfortunately some of Mr Parker's men, who slept in an empty stall of the same open stable or shed (including the prisoner F. Hall, who was specially in charge of the horses,) were so overpowered by the drugged spirits supplied from one of the public houses in York, which they had too freely imbibed the preceding evening, under the excitement of our approaching departure, that all her snortings and struggles did not avail to wake them from their heavy slumbers. This disagreeable accident necessitated the purchase of another horse at the eleventh hour, which however was promptly effected at the expense of the Exploration Committee.