Читать книгу Northmost Australia - Robert Logan Jack - Страница 12

The Cape York Peninsula, forming, as it does, the link binding the two great islands of Australia and New Guinea, is necessarily of the highest importance from a geological, ethnological, zoological, botanical, historical, political and strategical point of view.

It so happens that the Peninsula is the first part of Australia to which authentic written history refers. On the earliest landing of Europeans there arose the complex questions which obtrude themselves whenever civilisation comes into contact with barbarism.

My practical interest in the Peninsula began with a tour made in 1879 in the course of my Geological Survey work. On my way to the recently rushed and still more recently abandoned "Coen" gold diggings, I crossed the base of the then almost unknown Cape Melville Peninsula, where I found indications of auriferous country, and also the rivers south of Princess Charlotte Bay, down which the unfortunate explorer Kennedy had struggled in vain to keep his appointment with the relief ship twenty-two years earlier. From the Coen, I was only able to push out to the north for a period inexorably limited by the condition of my horses and the quantity of food remaining in my saddle-bags. Even under these conditions, however, I penetrated for some distance into the McIlwraith Range, and on the heads of the river which I named the Peach (unaware that it was the river named the Archer by the Brothers Jardine, who crossed it near its mouth) I found widespread evidence of the presence of gold and tin.

From the Laura Telegraph Office, from Cooktown, and ultimately from my headquarters at Townsville, I made such communications as were possible in anticipation of a complete report to the head of the Department of Mines, which administered the Geological Survey.

My individual impression was that the reefs in the district traversed were of more importance than the alluvial gold, but there had been neither means nor time at my disposal to enable me to satisfy myself of the value of either, and this view I duly represented in my correspondence with the Department.

The desire of the Government, and of the eager diggers throughout Queensland, was to discover an alluvial goldfield on the pattern of the Palmer, which was by that time approaching exhaustion.

A party of miners, headed by James Crosbie, volunteered to go and settle the question of the existence of payable alluvial gold, and they asked for and obtained government assistance, and I was instructed to lead them to the spot. In addition, a prospecting party was equipped, with money subscribed in Cook-town, and sent out to anticipate the expedition subsidised by the Government.

The combined geological and prospecting parties left Cooktown on 26th November, 1879, and striking out from the "bend of the Kennedy" on the Cooktown-Palmerville road, reached the "Peach" (Archer) River on 20th December. The prospectors commenced operations at once, and were rewarded with "prospects" which led them into the jungle-clad recesses of the McIlwraith Range. Here, to their disappointment, although prospects were obtained here and there, the creeks and gullies were found to run over almost bare rocks, their beds being too steep for the retention of any quantity of alluvial "washdirt." On 30th December, the wet season set in. For the remainder of our time in the field, the creeks were too swollen for the "bottom" to be reached where there was any washdirt at all, or the ground was too sodden to carry our horses. There were long and vexatious delays when it was neither possible to work nor to travel. Nevertheless, we continued, during breaks in the bad weather, to cross the McIlwraith Range and touch the Macrossan Range. Regaining the summit of the McIlwraith Range, we followed it to its northern extremity, where the valley of the Pascoe River separates it from the mountain mass which we named the Janet Range. It was found that the Pascoe River bounds the Janet Range on the south and east, and we practically followed it down till we had finally to cross it where it took an easterly course towards the Pacific. We had already made up our minds that it was safer to chance the unknown in the north than to return to Cooktown across several great rivers, now all certain to be flooded. No sooner had we left the Pascoe than we entered on the Bad Lands or Wet Desert of "heath" and "scrub" without anything for horses to live on. From the Pascoe to the Escape River, our course must have coincided in many places with Kennedy's on his "forlorn hope" journey, and we repeated many of his experiences, as told by his surviving companion Jackey-Jackey, but happily not the series of disasters which resulted in his own death and the disasters which overtook the two parties he left behind to await the relief he went to bring. The natives displayed in our case, as in Kennedy's, a persistent hostility which hampered our

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 14th 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

formed its most essential part. I resumed my task with renewed vigour, and with a wider scope, and Mr. Dick, up to the date of his death, assisted me in many ways through his local and personal knowledge, happily of more recent date than mine. I am grateful to his memory, and am conscious that he was, in a sense, "the only begetter of these ensuing lines."

Between 1880 and 1913, a great deal of charting of the interior had been accomplished by the Departments of Lands and Mines, although even now that work is incomplete. The new lines gave me, when I was recharting the lost map, an opportunity of correcting my sketching to correspond with actual surveys.

The first lesson to force itself upon me was that my estimates of distances covered had been influenced by fatigue or difficulties on the one hand (leading to over-estimation) or by good-going and good-feeding for the horses on the other (leading to underestimation).

The second lesson was that, even in the direction of my course, I had in many instances strayed to the right or left, as a ship may steer a definite course and yet make leeway owing to the pressure of forces incorrectly estimated, or even not recognised. In short, the personal equation had to be introduced and allowed for before I could hope to reconcile my supposed with my actual position on any given date.

Long before I had finished the revision of my own narrative, it had become evident that its significance could not be fully understood without a critical study of the diaries of explorers who had gone before me and whose paths I had crossed from time to time. This led me back from Mulligan to Leichhardt, and as one by one the writings of honoured pioneers came under my review, I subjected them to the tests already applied to my own, and to the best of my ability substituted where the writers were for where they thought they were, and made the necessary allowances and corrections. Then it seemed that the story might as well be continued to the present date by the addition of the developments which have taken place since 1880 through the instrumentality of surveyors, explorers and prospectors. Some of the actors are, happily, still alive, and these have rendered material assistance by the contribution of original matter. Among these are Webb, Bradford, Paterson and Embley. To the last-named gentleman, especially, I am indebted for assistance rendered doubly valuable by his prolonged residence in the Peninsula, and which, in some parts of the work, almost amounted to collaboration.

While dealing with land explorers it was borne in upon me that they owed some of their difficulties and many of their errors to an imperfect comprehension of the work of earlier maritime explorers. They were not, indeed, to be blamed for this, as in few instances could they have perused the narratives or seen the

charts of the sea-adventurers. As it was, the Dutch sailors named "reviers," or inlets, on the Gulf coast, and subsequent explorers of the interior, almost without exception, made bad guesses at the connection of their rivers with the inlets on the coast line. I do not propose any reform so drastic as to restore their original names to the western rivers of the Peninsula, but content myself, after years of research, with distinguishing the original, or right, or de jure names from the de facto names, the product of pardonable misidentifications sanctioned, in many cases, by half a century of popular and official usage. I have, I hope, succeeded in making it clear that, in many instances, the de facto names are in reality not those bestowed by the earliest explorers, but rather what are called "complimentary" names.

From the preceding explanation, it will be understood that this work began, so to speak, in the middle, and followed lines dictated by the questions which arose during its progress. It was ultimately realised that it would be advisable to arrange it in chronological order, so that the tale told by each explorer might be compared with the facts ascertained by his predecessors and at the same time be complete in itself. Of no less importance was the consideration of precisely how much knowledge each explorer had of the achievements of his predecessors; and this point has exacted very careful study. I am forced to the conclusion that in most instances the later explorers knew very little about their predecessors, having taken what little they knew at second hand and without having had access to important documents, some of which, indeed, only came to light after their own time.

While aiming at chronological order, it must be conceded that it is not always possible to observe it strictly. It may be that the stories of two observers overlap; or a statement may demand historical investigation into the past; or, again, it may be convenient at once to trace the outcome of a newly discovered fact downwards to the present time. Hence a certain amount of repetition is inevitable, as facts or statements are viewed by one observer after another from a different angle.

It is impossible to define the exact base of the Cape York Peninsula, and in writing of it one must occasionally follow its pioneers beyond its southern boundary, however liberal or elastic the definition of the latter may be. The historian of France needs no excuse for referring to happenings in Germany or Italy. In a parallel way, what was commenced as a history of the Cape York Peninsula has come to include Torres Strait, the "Gulf" country west to the boundary of Queensland and the Pacific country as far south as Bowen.

SYDNEY,

30th September, 1920.