The General Bright Green Colour
Of The Brushwood And Other Plants, Viewed From A Distance,
Seemed To Promise Fertility.
A single walk, however, was enough
to dispel such an illusion; and he who thinks with me will never
wish to walk again in so uninviting a country.
One day I accompanied Captain Fitz Roy to Bald Head;
the place mentioned by so many navigators, where some imagined
that they saw corals, and others that they saw petrified
trees, standing in the position in which they had grown.
According to our view, the beds have been formed by the
wind having heaped up fine sand, composed of minute rounded
particles of shells and corals, during which process
branches and roots of trees, together with many land-shells,
became enclosed. The whole then became consolidated by
the percolation of calcareous matter; and the cylindrical
cavities left by the decaying of the wood, were thus also
filled up with a hard pseudo-stalactical stone. The weather
is now wearing away the softer parts, and in consequence
the hard casts of the roots and branches of the trees project
above the surface, and, in a singularly deceptive manner,
resemble the stumps of a dead thicket.
A large tribe of natives, called the White Cockatoo men
happened to pay the settlement a visit while we were there.
These men, as well as those of the tribe belonging to King
George's Sound, being tempted by the offer of some tubs of
rice and sugar, were persuaded to hold a "corrobery," or
great dancing-party.
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