THE LATE CAPTAIN STURT.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 14, Issue 725, 11 October 1869, Page 4

T HE LATE CAPTAIN STURT.

[daily telegraph.] " Died, on the 16th June, 1869, at Cheltenham, Charles Sturt, Esq., late of the 39th Regiment;" thus quietly is chronicled the departure of a man whose actions will live in English history. He never strove for what the vulgarly ambitious call fame; he was 3 most modest, simple-minded, and retiring gentleman; and the world passed him by, shouting praises to more boisterous heroes, and worthies of a rougher cast. We might almost Bay that he was forgotten before his death; and even now it is doubtful whether the mention of his name will suffice, without some brief outline of his achievements, to remind English men that they have lost one of the most illustrious of their countrymen. Now, some 40 years ago, " without fear and without reproach," brave as a paladin, gentle as a girl, this man went into the wilderness, and by his genius and his valor laid the foundations of a new English State which is rapidly growing into greatness. Had he won an Indian battle, no matter whether by his own strategy or by the sheer dogged courage of his troops, he would have received a peerage. He discovered the River Murray, he opened up the whole interior of Australia to English settlement and enterprise; and he dies untitled, undecorated, unrewarded, a simple gentleman, retired from the army, like a hundred others who doze away the quiet evening of their lives at Cheltenham. No sense pf neglect, however, no feeling of resentment embittered his last years. The delicacy of his nature made him shrink from vulgar applause. Not with Roman pride like that of Coriolanus, but with the self-respecting modesty of a Christian gentleman, he declined to show his wounds in the market-place. He wished, indeed, at a time when services similar in kind to his own, though far inferior in degreewere receiving honorary recognition from the State, to be included in the list. It is understood that this wish would have been granted in a few weeks; but he had waited a long while already for some official recognition of the kind, and at last he could noj; wait any longer. He died.

We must go back 40 years to begin even our faint and hurried outline of a memorable and illustrious career. Charles Sturt landed in New South "Wales with the 39 th, of which he was a captain. There are many ways in Which the officers of colonial garrisons can occupy their time —in balls, in flirtation, in billiards, in field-sports. Sturt does not seem to have been in any way an ascetic, but he had a brain and a heart which demanded something better than this ordinary routine of regimental life, When he arrived the learned in Sydney were auxiously discussing the physical geography of Australia, of which little or nothing was then known. Sturt took a keen interest in the de bate, and became a partisan of the " Great Central Lake" theory—which, so far as the evidence then collected went was decidedly the most reasonable propounded. We must remember that the map of the island-continent at that period was little more than the bare outline of the coast, and that even in this outline there were huge gaps, representing hundreds of miles. Ox ley alone had gone far inland; and his researches had only shown him that the ope considerable stream known to exist dwindled away, growing shallower and shallower, until it fairly spread out and lost itself under enormous reeds in a desolate marsh. Oxley, however, had journeyed in a wet season; might it not be worth while to try the experiment again in a time of drought? The young soldier thought so, and he soon had a chance of carrying his plan into execution. For two years the land was baked and burnt, To use Sturt's own words, »' The surface of the earth became so parched up that minor vegetation ceased upon it. Culinary herbs were raised with difficulty, and crops failed, even in the most favorable situations. Bettlers drove their flocks and herds to distant tracts for pasture and water. The interior suffered equally with the coast; and men at length began to despond under so alarming a visitation. h almost appeared as if the Australian

sky were never again to be traversed by a cloud." la November, 1828, he started on his first expedition, with a friend, a couple of soldiers, and six convicts. Again the Macquarie was traced to its " Slough of Despond ;" and soon, as they journeyed on, Sturt and his men began to suffer: bitterly from want of water. A moment of supreme exultation—a moment of horrible disappointment—awaited them. As they toiled along the parched soil, themselves feverish with thirst, they were suddenly aware of a broad and noble river in the distance, flowing rapidly on and glistening in the sunlight, with wild fowl sporting on its surface. With a cheer of delight they pushed forward. Sturt shall tell the story himself. " Its banks," he says, were too precipitous to allow of our watering the cattle, but the men eagerly descended to quench their thirst, which a powerful sun had contributed to increase ; nor shall I ever forget the cry of amazement that followed their doing so, or the look of terror and disappointment with which they called out to inform me that the water was so salt as to be unfit to drink/' Thus was the river Darling found in 1829 ; to-day, there are busy steamboats on the waters then covered with wild fowl.

Sturt had explored 1300 miles of unknown country, the bulk of which is now used for pasture or tillage ; and in the following year he set forth upon a still more memorable journey. Leaving Sydney in September, 1829, he followed the course of the Murrumbulgee —a deep and rapid stream, widely different in its character from the marshy Lachlau or the sluggish and shallow Macquarrie. The natives whom they met upon their way assured them that they would find a still larger river further on, flowing from S.E.; and yet, soon after receiving this encouragement, they found the stream shoaling, and the ominous marsh-reeds made their appearance. Still, Sturt pushed on. The characterof the country changed. Sandy deserts, into which the cattle often sank knee deep, succeeded to the pleasant grass plains through which at first they had travelled. The river became tortuous and winding. Every day the difficulties of the march increased. It was plain that they must leave their cattle and heavy baggage behind. What was to be done ? Sturt took his resolution in a moment. He formed a depot, sent back the drags and cattle, put together a whaleboat, and, embarking with a friend, Mr M'Leary, and six men, floated away with the current into the wilderness. A skiff containing their provisions was in tow, but ere long she overset, and many of the stores were lost. Snags impeded the navigation, and more than once the wreck of the boat seemed inevitable. Confident that he was on the right track, Sturt held on, past sunken or floating timber, and over dangerous rapids, until one day the look-out man exclaimed that they were nearing another stream, and in a few minutes more their boat was swept, with a rush aud a swing, into the main current of the River Murray, the greatest river of the vast " island continent." Apart from the mere difficulties of navigation they were exposed to the attacks from the Aborigines; but Charles Sturt never had his match for the triumphantly successful way in which he dealt with natives. In the coolest manner he used to go forward, waving a branch, if there happened to be any timber in the neighborhood, or making such other pantomimic signs of friendship as occurred to him; and presently he would be found sitting down in the middle of a ring of " black fellows," as much at his ease as though dining at his club. But with him alse, as with his friend Eyre, as with Cook, and all the great English explorers, it was " the hand of iron in the velvet glove." The natives were swarming round him once, on this very voyage, apparently bent on fighting. " As we neared the sand-bank," he says, " I stood up and made signs to the natives to desist, but without success. I took up my gun, therefore, and cocking it, had already brought it down to a level. A few seconds more would have closed the life of some of the nearest savages. The. distance was too trifling for me to doubt the fatal effects of the discharge i for I was determined to take deadly aim, in the hopes that the fall of one mm might save the lives of

many." Far distant be the day when this high spirit of our nobler Englishmen shall grow faint —when men who mistake recklessness for bravery shall positively exult in the chance of a " brush with the niggers." There are ugly signs of a tendency that way ! " Siurt's Eight," as we will venture to call that historical whaleboat, second only to the one in which Bass discovered the straits that bear his name, went briskly along with the current of the Murray, and very soon reached another river, which Sturt at once declared to be the Darling. This theory was long disputed, but its truth was ultimately proved ; and indeed he had that wonderful, that indescribable, incommunicable quality in an explorer which reminds one of a Bed Indian's skill in following a trail. Almost instinctively he seemed to take in and comprehend the whole natural features of a country, carrying, as it were, a compass in his brain. On they went until the Murray poured itself into the great salt expanse which Sturt called Lake Alexandrina, within sight aud sound of the sea. A great geogrophical problem had been solved, a noble service rendered to England. But it was time now to return. Day after day they rowed backwards against the rapid current of the stream. It was terrible work for captain and crew. Night after night, when the men thought he was asleep, Sturt heard a muttered complaint. "It's no use; I can't go on any longer; I don't like*it, but I must tell the captain to-morrow." To-morrow came. They never said a word, but bent to the oar like bra,ve Englishmen as they were, loving their leader, aud proud of him. Sturt had himself suffered severely in both these expeditions—so much so, that when he published his book in 1833 he was almost blind ; but the passion for exploring does—not easily leave a man who has once felt its in fluence. After being employed lor some years as colonial surveyor for South Australia, he matured another plan for an inland journey—this time towards the very centre of the Continent —and setiorth in the September of 1844. There has seldom been a more unfortunate expedition. The plan was good; his followers —no less a man than M'Douall Stuart amongst them were eminently fit for the work; and yet it resulted in misery aud failure. As it happened, the party just hit upon the worst part of the whole land. Often a few miles out of their course might have led them into more fertile country ; but, though they sparedjio toil and feared no danger, some inexplicable fatality seemed to mock their hopes. Men have since followed much the same plan, and it has led them safe and sound to Gulf of Carpentaria; but it was Sturt's destiny to be a pathfinder only, and not to journey over the ground when it was safe and easy of access. Yet, even as it was, his discovery of Cooper's Creek—since variously known as the Victoria River, and as the Barcoo, began a new era of Australian exploration too late for Sturt to follow up his own discoveries. The hardships endured were horrible. The land burnt up around the travel- ; lers ; the scrub and brushwood on the hills took fire; and the acrid smoke > rolled towards them, through the sultry atmosphere, over the arid land. They came upon the Stony Desert — an ocean of stone, with huge boulders for its waves, and far in the horizon red sandhills looming like a range of cliffs. Ascending one after another of these, hoping the scene would change, they saw again the dark purple of the deserts, the menacing red of the dunes. Their cattle, before they died of thirst, shifted their feet about as though seeking for a cool place on the burning marl. When the explorers, in camp, tried to write, the ink dried in the pen. They tried to paint, the colors caked and cracked. They had to dig a huge chamber underground to save their lives, Even then, the second in command, M.r Poole, sank rapidly, and died of black scurvy. Almost to the last Sturt, whose activity was indefatigable, hoped on; but at length it is told of him that, with an almost broken heart, 5 * he sat more than an hour on the top of the sandhill with his face buried his hands, evidently quite crushed by this final disappointment." And yet he tried again. It was after this that he found Coopers Creek. £ut at last, for bare life that

he must needs turn back. He reached one of his depots only to find it deserted. He was not surprised—only sick, only sorry, only stunned and beaten. "A sickenning feeling came over me," he says, "when I found they were really gone. Not on my account; for, with the bitter feelings of disappointment with which I was returning home, I could have oalmly laid my head upon the desert, never to raise it again." By God's great mercy, his friends bore him home. He reached Adelaide in safety. But he was blind.

Not to the end of his life didjhe ever quite recover his eyesight; and this may have helped to intensify his naturally modest and retiring disposition. He had so far outlived his fame that, outside his own little circle, most men fancied him dead. The time had come at last for his departure. He died comparatively poor, yet rich in the more precious part of wealth —in the retrospect of a long life most purely and nobly spent. The praises that might have gladdened his ears had he lived, must be spoken above his tomb. Yet there is no shadow of loss, defeat, or failure in so simply and serenely beautiful a career. His work lives after him, as that of one who revealed to man fresh tracts of his domain. On the steps of the lonely explorer, the emigrant waggon and the railway have followed. The wildernesses through which he pushed his solitary way are now white with sheep. His name will live with the purest in our story, standing not unworthily beside those of Cook, and Parry, aud Franklin — men as gentle as they were strong, as loving as they were brave. Sorrowfully, but proudly, we recall his memory to the recollection of his countrymen. In the calm evening of an adventurous life, the grand old wanderer hfis departed on his final journey —that journey which lies before us all. Trouble, and anxiety, and doubt are over, as he passes with a heavenly guide towards a heavenly goal.