anchorage is safe all the year wand. The rise of the tide in the Bay of Shoals is ten or eleven feet.
Snakes are numerous, but Captain Sutherland was not annoyed by them; nor did he see any venomous ones. There are many guanas as large as a small alligator, but they are quite harmless.
Captain Sutherland declared his intention of settling at Kangaroo Island, if the colony were founded; and he proposed to follow the whale fishery, for which the locality is, in his opinion, admirably adapted.*
Captain Dillon states that in the Bay of Shoals he found good anchorage for ships under 300 tons, and safe from all winds. The climate he found very good, and the soil of the western coast bore as fertile an appearance as the shores of Van Diemen's Land. He went but a mile inland at any part, but wherever he landed (and this was on several parts of the Island) timber was plentiful. In the neighbourhood of the salt lagoon, it was open forest land, but the trees there were not so large as on the western coast. He saw a great many kangaroos; they were the forest kangaroos of the continent, and were larger and fatter than those of Van Diemen's Land.
He took 7 tons of salt on board, and would have taken 40 tons more, had he not allowed it to remain on the bed of the lagoon after having collected it, where it was dissolved by a fall of rain. He also took 500 seals on the Island.
The account given by Richard Wootton, Steward of the brig Guardian, is much to the same effect as the preceding statement. He landed about twelve miles west of Point Marsden with some shipmates and dogs, to shoot kangaroos, walking towards Nepean Baywhere his ship was to anchor. They succeeded in killing a dozen kangaroos of a larger sort than the Wallaba species. Where they landed the shore was barren; but it continued improving till they arrived at Nepean
