At Rose Hill, where as yet there was not any night-watch established, petty thefts and depredations were frequently committed, particularly on the wheat as it ripened.  The bakehouse also was robbed of a quantity of flour by a person unknown.  These offences were generally attributed to the reduction which had taken place in the ration of provisions; and every one dreaded how much the commission of them might be increased, if accident or delay should render a still greater reduction necessary.

Mr. Dodd, the superintendant at that settlement, a few days before Christmas, cut and sent down a cabbage which weighed twenty-six pounds.  The other vegetables productions of his garden, which was by no means a rich mould, were plentiful and luxuriant.

Some people who had been out with a gun from Rose Hill brought in with them, on their return, a tinder-box, to which chance conducted them in a thick brush distinguished by the name of the New Brush, about six miles from the settlement.  This article was known to have belonged to the two unfortunate soldiers who had been unaccounted for since last April, and who, in great probability, found there a miserable period to their existence.  They also picked up in the same brush a piece of linen, said to have formed part of a petticoat which belonged to Anne Smith, a female convict who absconded a few days after our landing in the country.  This might have been carried thither and dropped by some natives in their way through the brush; but it gave a strong colour to the supposition of her having likewise perished, by some means or other, in the woods.

CHAPTER IX

A convict made a free settler
A pleasing delusion
Extraordinary supply of fish
Caesar’s narrative
Another convict wounded by the natives
The Supply arrives from Norfolk Island
A large number of settlers sent thither on board the Sirius and
Supply
Heavy rains
Scarcity of provisions increasing in an alarming degree
Lieutenant Maxwell’s insanity
News brought of the loss of the Sirius
Allowance of provisions still further reduced
The Supply sent to Batavia for relief
Robberies frequent and daring
An old man dies of hunger
Rose Hill
Salt and fishing-lines made
The native escapes
Transactions

1790.]

January.] Early in the new year the Supply sailed again for Norfolk Island with twenty-two male and two female convicts, and one child; Lieutenant King having in his last letters intimated, that he could very well find employment for a greater number of people than he then had under his orders.  With those convicts and some stores she sailed on the 7th, and on her return was to touch at Lord Howe island to procure turtle.