Roving Google Earth is a fascinating experience, particularly for those of us who, for whatever reason, will never be able to visit the far-flung edges of the globe. It’s one of my favorite diversions, and that’s how, when bouncing between the Timor Sea and the Great Australian Bight, to my astonishment I found, on the southern tip of Western Australia’s “Golden Outback,” Mississippi Hill.
Mississippi Hill is in Cape Le Grand National Park in the extreme south of Western Australia, 35 mi. east of Esperance. The southwest section of the park is dominated by rock outcrops of gneiss and granite. These form a distinctive chain of peaks including Mount Le Grand (1,130 ft.), Frenchman Peak (860 ft.), and Mississippi Hill (590 ft.), named by a British explorer, Edward John Eyre.
In February,1841, Eyre began one of the great treks across the Australian continent, passing over 1000 mi. from Port Lincoln, South Australia, to Albany, Western Australia through the arid expanses of the Nullabor Plain. Nearly 800 mi. into their journey, exhausted, near starvation, and eking by water from sporadic rains, on the 2nd of June, slightly east of today’s Esperance on the south Australian Bight, they climbed a rocky hill and saw a ship at anchor, barely 7 miles away.
It was a French whaler, the Mississippi—the French had been invested in Mississippi for some time, e.g. the Mississippi Bubble—and the ship’s captain, as luck would have it an Englishman named Rossiter, pressed supplies on them – cognac and Dutch cheese – and they continued the 280 miles east to the British settlement of Albany.
For his trek, Eyre was awarded the Royal Geographic Society gold medal and has had a number of geographical features named after him, including Lake Eyre and the Eyre Peninsula. And while I have yet to hear back from the Western Australia Parks and Wildlife Service—of course I did—perhaps it’s safe to assume that the rocky hill from which Eyre’s company spied the ship that saved them was named “Mississippi” out of gratitude.
