1803.
June.
after a somewhat tedious passage from the Barrier Reefs; he made himself an anchor of heavy wood on the coast, for fear of accident to his sole remaining bower, but fortunately had no occasion to use it. Besides the Lady Nelson, we found lying in Sydney Cove H.M. armed vessel Porpoise, the Bridgewater extra-Indiaman, the ships Cato, Rolla, and Alexander, and brig Nautilus. The Géographe and Naturaliste had not sailed for the South Coast till some months after I left Port Jackson to go to the northward, and so late as the end of December, captain Baudin was lying at King's Island in Bass' Strait; it was therefore not very probable that he should reach the Gulph of Carpentaria by the middle of February, when I had finished its examination, nor even at the beginning of March, when the south-west monsoon would set in against him.
We found also at Port Jackson Mr. James Inman (the present professor of mathematics at the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth), whom the Board of Longitude had sent out to join the expedition as astronomer, in the place of Mr. Crosley who had left us at the Cape of Good Hope. To this gentleman's care I committed all the larger astronomical instruments, and also the time keepers, after observations had been taken to compare their longitudes with that of Cattle Point. The results obtained on the 10th a.m., with the Goose-island-Bay rates, were,
| From | No. 543, | - | 151° | 18′ | 41″ east. |
| No. 520, | - | 151 | 16 | 22 |
Cattle Point having been settled in 151° 11′ 49″ (see Vol. I. p. 267.), the mean error of the time keepers was 5′ 42″,5 to the east; and as I have no means to form an accelerating correction to the Goose-island-Bay rates, the 5′ 42″,5 of error has been equally apportioned throughout the twenty days between the two stations.
In order to re-establish the health of the ship's company, I contracted for a regular supply of vegetables and fresh meat; and such was the favourable change in the state of the colony in one year, that the meat, pork one day and mutton another, was obtained