Page:The State and Position of Western Australia.djvu/144

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Medina Beacon, painted red, and the Alligator Beacon, white, point out the channel into Owen’s Anchorage. The former is placed in four fathoms water, on the northern edge of the Parmelia Bank, which extends from Woodman’s Point to Carnac; and the Alligator Beacon is in five fathoms water, on the southern spit of the Success Bank. They are nearly a mile apart, in a line between Fremantle and the Haycock on Garden Island, with seven to nine fathoms water between them. A ship should steer between them, and, after passing over a bank of three fathoms water, bring up about a mile from the shore, and nearly the same distance to the south-eastward of a beacon which has been placed in two fathoms water, at fifty yards to the westward of the fish-rocks. Should this beacon disappear, the Fish-rocks may be found by keeping the largest Seal-rock on with the south-end of the Mewstone, and bringing the extremity of Rous Head in a line with a conspicuous large sand patch on the coast to the northward.

The Snapper Buoy and Pointer Beacon, as represented in the printed chart of 1831, have not been laid down, in consequence of the channel between Carnac and the Western Bank, for which they were intended as leading marks, having been found too intricate for general use, until means are available for marking off some of the principal dangers in it. The same cause has superseded the present necessity for placing the Basket Beacon at Second Head, and the Brothers Beacon at Beacon Head; nor has it been considered necessary at present to place the Spit Beacon off the north-east point of Garden Island, the foregoing directions for avoiding it being amply sufficient for keeping a ship out of danger in that quarter.


APPENDIX, No. V.


Swan-River Mission.

In the course of the past year a few friends of Missions in Glasgow, sensible of the claims which the natives of Western Australia have on them, proposed to the Church Missionary Society to send a missionary there, and that the expense of the station should be borne by them-