It yet remains for me to state that when Mr. Kent returned to the schooner, after this irreparable loss, he kept to the south of the place at which he had crossed the first range with Captain Barker, and travelled through a valley right across the promontory.  He thus discovered that there was a division in the ranges, through which there was a direct and level road from the little bay on the northern extremity of which they had last landed in St. Vincent’s Gulf, to the rocky point of Encounter Bay.  The importance of this fact will be better estimated, when it is known that good anchorage is secured to small vessels inside the island that lies off the point of Encounter Bay, which is rendered still safer by a horse shoe reef that forms, as it were, a thick wall to break the swell of the sea.  But this anchorage is not safe for more than five months in the year.  Independently of these points, however, Mr. Kent remarks, that the spit a little to the north of Mount Lofty would afford good shelter to minor vessels under its lee.  When the nature of the country is taken into consideration, and the facility of entering that which lies between the ranges and the Lake Alexandrina, from the south, and of a direct communication with the lake itself, the want of an extensive harbour will, in some measure, be compensated for, more especially when it is known that within four leagues of Cape Jervis, a port little inferior to Port Jackson, with a safe and broad entrance, exists at Kangaroo Island.  The sealers have given this spot the name of American Harbour.  In it, I am informed, vessels are completely land-locked, and secure from every wind.  Kangaroo Island is not, however, fertile by any means.  It abounds in shallow lakes filled with salt water during high tides, and which, by evaporation, yield a vast quantity of salt.

I gathered from the sealers that neither the promontory separating St. Vincent from Spencer’s Gulf, nor the neighbourhood of Port Lincoln, are other than barren and sandy wastes.  They all agree in describing Port Lincoln itself as a magnificent roadstead, but equally agree as to the sterility of its shores.  It appears, therefore, that the promontory of Cape Jervis owes its superiority to its natural features; in fact, to the mountains that occupy its centre, to the debris that has been washed from them, and to the decomposition of the better description of its rocks.  Such is the case at Illawarra, where the mountains approach the sea; such indeed is the case every where, at a certain distance from mountain ranges.

Adaption of this part of the country for colonisation.