They generally returned heavily laden between two and three in the afternoon.

I always knew the time pretty accurately by the sun, but I lost count of the days.
The months, however, I always reckoned by the moon, and for each year I made a notch on the inside of my bow.
My own food was usually wrapped in palm leaves before being placed in the sand oven.

Of course the leaves always burned, but they kept the meat free from sand; and my indefatigable wife was always exercising her ingenuity to provide me with fresh dainties.

In addition to the ordinary fare of the natives, I frequently had wild ducks and turkeys, and--what was perhaps the greatest luxury of all--eggs, which the natives sent for specially on my account to distant parts of the surrounding country, and also to the islands of the coast where white cockatoos reared their young in rocky cliffs.
At the time of my shipwreck I had little or no knowledge of Australian geography, so that I was utterly at a loss as to my position.

I afterwards learnt, however, that Yamba's home was on Cambridge Gulf, on the NNW.