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enough … ran off. We pursued; but a contest between heavy-armed Europeans fettered by ligatures, and naked unencumbered Indians, was too unequal to last long. They darted into the wood and disappeared.
    The alarm being given, they moved rapidly to a little village of five huts which stood nearby. Before they could reach it, however, three canoes filled with Aborigines were seen paddling with great haste to the opposite shore. Exhausted and sweating, the avengers could only search the huts for ‘weapons of war’. They found none. Knowing the chances of surprising anybody were gone, at least for that day, Tench ordered the men to return to their baggage. After a rest they marched for two hours in the afternoon, finally camping at a swamp. Wasted by fatigue and heat they settled down for the night but found no real respite as black clouds of mosquitoes and sandflies fell on them. They hauled themselves back into Sydney the following day.
    Phillip ordered them out again, this time at night. Hoping to fool the natives, they pretended to prepare a raid on Broken Bay to capture the man who had thrown a spear at the Governor a little earlier. They marched out under a full moon three days before Christmas, proceeding to the river they had waded through on the return leg of the last mission. The tide forced a halt to any advance until quarter past two in the morning. Dropping all their equipment except firearms and ammo boxes – which they tied fast on top of their heads – they waded across. Six short men and one sergeant, ‘who from their low stature and other causes were most likely to impede our march’, were left to guard the equipment train.
    Tench ordered the guides to move out as quickly as possible, without regard for terrain. They hurried alongside the river for three quarters of an hour, suddenly stopping by a creek about fifty metres wide ‘which extended to our right and appeared dry from the tide being out’. Tench consulted the guides, asking whether the bed could be crossed safely, or whether it might be better to walk around the head of the water course, a few hundred metres away. The guides indicated it would be a dangerous crossing but feasible. And so Tench’s second expedition teetered on the edge of disaster. Pressed for time, he ordered his men over. Within a few minutes they began to sink into the creek bed.
    We were immersed nearly to the waist in mud so thick and tenacious that it was not without the most vigorous exertion of every muscle of the body that the legs could be disengaged. When we had reached the middle, our distress became not only more pressing but serious, and each succeeding step buried us deeper. At length a sergeant of grenadiers stuck fast, and declared himself incapable of moving either forward or backward; and just after, Ensign Prentice and I felt ourselves in a similar predicament, close together.
    Men cried out in distress all around. Tench did not know what to do. With every moment the danger increased. Luckily, those at the rear of the column, warned by the soldier’s shouts, moved towards the head of the creek and passed over safely.
    Our distress would have terminated fatally had not a soldier cried out to those on shore to cut boughs of trees and throw them to us – a lucky thought which certainly saved many of us from perishing miserably; and even with this assistance, had we been burdened by our knapsacks, we could not have emerged; for it employed us near half an hour to disentangle some of our number. The sergeant of grenadiers, in particular, was sunk to his breastbone, and so firmly fixed in that the efforts of many men were required to extricate him, which was effected in the moment after I had ordered one of the ropes, destined to bind the captive Indians, to be fastened under his arms.
    Congratulating each other on a close escape, the soldiers cleaned their rifles of mud, formed up and pushed on. They found themselves a few