You have to take the greatest triumphs and the greatest disasters with equal equanimity. There is no more terrible sight than to come across explorers whose fear has overtaken their judgement; to find their huddled bodies not five miles away from supplies, and food, because they eventually lost confidence in their ability to survive.’ He paused, and looked out towards the grey glittering waters of the Gulf of St Vincent. ‘I will never forget when we arrived at last at Lake Alexandrina, the lake which I named for our young queen-to-be. It was separated from the Indian Ocean by nothing more than a few sand-bars; and the plan had been to carry our boats over the sandbars to be loaded on to a ship. We could have sailed back to Sydney in complete comfort! But there was no ship there, and our food and water were almost exhausted. Now, the angry and emotional thing to do would have been to curse our luck, and wait for a ship to arrive. But, had we done that, we would most certainly have died.
