Southern Seas, the Governor was bound to record every important occurrence and every measure he thought fit to take. Details of population, accounts of expenditure, judicial reports, all had to be copied in duplicate or triplicate and transmitted to the Colonial Office.
In the first year of Macquarie's rule, the means of conveyance were very irregular. By the most direct routes, by the Cape of Good Hope or Rio Janeiro, the voyage occupied from four to eight months. But many of the ships touching at Sydney returned to England by way of India or were bound for the whale-fisheries in the South Seas. The Colonial Office complained in May, 1812, that no public despatches had arrived since April, 1811, although two whalers, which had put in at Sydney, had since reached England.[1] Macquarie replied that these conveyances were not reliable. Whaling vessels often spent six or twelve months on their fishing stations. The voyage by India also was usually a protracted one.[2] Lord Bathurst replied that not having received a public despatch from the Colony for above fifteen months, he was anxious "to learn more in detail an account of its progress and prosperity, which you state to be still uninterrupted; and in order to prevent the inconvenience which results from so infrequent a communication between the Colony and the mother country, I have to request that for the future you will avail yourself of any opportunity which may offer of forwarding your despatches to India to be sent home by the first Company's ship which may be about to proceed to England".[3]
From this time Macquarie found himself making somewhat similar complaints of the Secretary of State. "I have much to lament," he wrote in March, 1816, "that I have not yet been honoured with communication from your Lordship on several very interesting and important points relative to the Colony … as contained in my despatches … in the years 1813, 1814 and 1815".[4] The Secretary of State in his reply reminded him "how much the length and uncertainty of the
