The latter remained the furthest known
inland water of Australia for many years after Sturt's return. Sturt
was accompanied, as surveyor and draftsman, by John McDouall Stuart,
whom I shall mention in his turn. So far as my opinion, formed in my
wanderings over the greater portions of the country explored by Sturt,
goes, his estimate of the regions he visited has scarcely been borne
out according to the views of the present day.
Like Oxley, he was fully impressed with the notion that an inland sea
did exist, and although he never met such a feature in his travels, he
seems to have thought it must be only a little more remote than the
parts he had reached. He was fully prepared to come upon an inland
sea, for he carried a boat on a bullock waggon for hundreds of miles,
and when he finally abandoned it he writes: "Here we left the boat
which I had vainly hoped would have ploughed the waters of an inland
sea." Several years afterwards I discovered pieces of this boat, built
of New Zealand pine, in the debris of a flood about twenty miles down
the watercourse where it had been left. A great portion, if not all
the country, explored by that expedition is now highly-prized pastoral
land, and a gold field was discovered almost in sight of a depot
formed by Sturt, at a spot where he was imprisoned at a water hole for
six months without moving his camp.
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