would answer no other purpose than that of bringing them to pine away in misery.
'Your Lordship will, I hope, excuse the confused manner in which I have in this letter given an account of what has past since I left the Cape of Good Hope. It has been written at different times, and my situation at present does not permit me to begin so long a letter again, the canvas house I am under being neither wind nor water proof.'
In reading these extracts, it should be remembered that all previous knowledge of Port Jackson is summed up in these words from Cook's Voyages: 'At this time (noon, 6th May 1770) we were between two and three miles distant from the land and abreast of a bay or harbour in which there appeared to be a good anchorage, and which I called Port Jackson.'
Phillip was not the man to waste words in his despatches, and so he says nothing of the interesting ceremony at the inauguration of the settlement. On this subject latter-day historians have not been so reticent, and one writer in a book published thirty-five years ago put an up-to-date speech into the mouth of the Governor, in which, among other things equally remarkable, he is made to discourse of the country's 'fertile plains, tempting only the slightest labours of the husbandman to produce in abundance the fairest and richest fruits; its interminable pastures, the future home of flocks and herds innumerable; its mineral wealth, already known to be so great as to
