1803.
January.
Thurs. 13.
evening, and from the same cause not much progress was made to the westward next day; but the land was better distinguished than before, and many straggling rocks and two islets were seen to lie off the north end of Groote Eylandt. Friday 14.In the morning of the 14th we weathered all these, and on the wind dying away, anchored in 11½ fathoms, blue mud; the outer North-point Islet, which lies in 13° 37′ south and 136° 45′ east, then bore E. 3° S. five miles, and the furthest extreme of a higher cliffy island, S. 38° W. three miles.
I went in a boat to this last island with the botanical gentlemen, intending to take bearings from the uppermost cliffs; but the many deep chasms by which the upper parts are intersected, made it impossible to reach the top in the short time we had to spare, and a few bearings from the eastern low point were all that could be obtained. This was called Chasm Island; it lies one mile and a half from a low point of Groote Eylandt, where the shore trends southward and seemed to form a bay, into which I proposed to conduct the ship.
We found upon Chasm Island a fruit which proved to be a new species of eugenia, of the size of an apple, whose acidity of taste was agreeable; there were also many large bushes covered with nutmegs, similar to those seen at Cape Vanderlin; and in some of the chasms the ground was covered with this fruit, without our being able, for some time, to know whence it came. Several trees shot up in these chasms, thirty or forty feet high, and on considering them attentively, these were found to be the trees whence the nutmegs had fallen; thus what was a spreading bush above, became, from the necessity of air and light, a tall, slender tree, and showed the admirable power in nature to accommodate itself to local circumstances. The fruit was small, and not of an agreeable flavour; nor is it probable that it can at all come in competition with the nutmeg of the Molucca Islands: it is the Myristica insipida of Brown's Prodrom. Nov. Holl. p. 400.
In the steep sides of the chasms were deep holes or caverns, undermining the cliffs; upon the walls of which I found rude drawings, made with charcoal and something like red paint upon the