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. Eyre was the first European to travel along the Great Australian Bight, a desolate, harsh, and empty land on the southern coastline of the continent.
His was one of the most horrible in the annals of Victorian exploration. He set out on New Year, 1841, with three aborigines, Wylie, Joey, and Yarry, and his overseer Baxter. Joey and Yarry shot Baxter dead and decamped with almost all the stores. The renegades shadowed Eyre and Wylie at a distance. The Eyre and Wylie survived on such fare as eagle stew and a penguin they found on the beach and ate skin and all. 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, which had departed from Hobart, Tasmania on February 12, 1938. The French had been invested in Mississippi for some time, e.g. the Mississippi Bubble. The ship’s captain, a an Englishman named Rossiter, pressed cognac and Dutch cheese upon Eyere’s company before the Mississsippi continued 280 miles east to the British settlement 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 reached out; don’t be silly—it’s a certainly that the tor was named Mississippi out of gratitude.
I think it’s quite pretty.
