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Edward John Eyre's two expeditions of 1839 to the interior of South Australia were his first expeditions as an explorer, if one discounts the two earlier trips he made down the Murray River to Adelaide, herding cattle and then sheep. ==North== Having made a tidy profit of several thousand pounds from his second overlanding trip, the young Eyre (then only twenty-three years old) turned his attention to the interior, and the speculation surrounding the possibility of an inland sea. Planning a three-month expedition to the head of the Spencer Gulf, he left Adelaide with five other men on May 1, 1839, taking two drays and travelling north for the coastal plain west of the Flinders Ranges. He named the Broughton River after William Broughton, the Anglican Bishop of Australia, and proceeded northward past the head of the gulf to establish camp halfway between The Dutchmans Stern and Mount Arden at a small creek with permanent springs in it: he named this Depot Creek and was to return to it several times in future years. From this camp he espied a low range of hills to the west, and sent his companion John Baxter to investigate - this range he later named the Baxter Range; it lies north of the town of Iron Knob. Eyre himself set off north along the margin of the Flinders. Finding little water (the pools of water in Willochra Creek were salty), he made for a hill some 30 km north-west of the later town of Hawker. From the summit he had his first view of Lake Torrens; he later wrote that it "seemed to be water", but he realised it was merely the "dry and glazed bed of where water had lodged" - a salt lake. To the north-east he noted that the ranges continued; "tier behind tier of very rocky appearance as far as the eye could reach". This was almost certainly the first time that a European had glimpsed the peaks of Wilpena Pound. After returning to camp and a brief foray 50 km down the western side of Spencer Gulf with Baxter, Eyre decided to return southwards. He was dissatisfied with the saltbush country (as he described it, "sandy desert interspersed with scrub"), not realising the grazing potential of the saltbush. On his return trip he turned east after leaving the Flinders behind and instead travelled back to Adelaide down the River Murray, reaching home on June 29. The Governor soon named his northernmost point Mount Eyre. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Eyre's 1839 expeditions」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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