During a storm of rain and thunder which happened in the afternoon of Saturday the 26th, two convict lads Dennis Reardon and William Meredith, who were employed in cutting wood just by the town when the rain commenced, ran to a tree for shelter, where they were found the next morning lying dead, together with a dog which followed them.  There was no doubt that the shelter which they sought had proved their destruction, having been struck dead by lightning, one or two flashes of which had been observed to be very vivid and near.  One of them, when he received the stroke, had his hands in his bosom; the hands of the other were across his breast, and he seemed to have had something in them.  The pupils of their eyes were considerably dilated, and the tongue of each, as well as that of the dog, was forced out between the teeth.  Their faces were livid, and the same appearance was visible on several parts of their bodies.  The tree at the foot of which they were found was barked at the top, and some of its branches torn off.  In the evening they were decently buried in one grave, to which they were attended by many of their fellow-prisoners.  Mr. Johnson, to a discourse which he afterwards preached on the subject, prefixed as a text these words from the first book of Samuel, chap xx verse 3.  ’There is but a step between me and death.’

This was the first accident of the kind that, to our knowledge, had occurred in the colony, though lightning more vivid and alarming had often been seen in storms of longer duration.

While every one was expecting our colonial vessel, the Francis, from New Zealand. the signal for a sail was made on the 29th; and shortly after the Fairy, an American snow, anchored in the cove from Boston in New England, and last from the island of St. Paul, whence she had a passage of only four weeks.  The master, Mr. Rogers, touched at False Bay; but from there not having been any recent arrivals from Europe, he procured no other intelligence at that port, than what we had already received.  At the island of St. Paul he found five seamen who had been left there from a ship two years before, and who had procured several thousand seal-skins.  They informed him, that Lord Macartney in his Majesty’s ship the Lion, and the Hindostan East-Indiaman, had touched there in their way to China, and Mr. Rogers expected to have heard that his lordship had visited this settlement.

The Fairy was to proceed from this place to the north-west coast of America, where the master hoped to arrive the first for the fur market.  Thence he was to go to China with his skins, and from China back to St. Paul, where he had left a mate and two sailors.  Their success was to regulate his future voyages.

Mr. Rogers expressed a surprise that we had not any small craft on the coast, as he had observed a plentiful harvest of seals as he came along.  He came in here merely to refresh, not having any thing on board for sale, his cargo consisting wholly of articles of traffic for the north-west coast of America.