The live stock in the country belonging to individuals was confined to three or four persons, who kept up the price in order to create an interest in the preservation of it.  An English cow, in calf by the bull which was brought here in the Gorgon, was sold by one officer to another for eighty pounds; and the calf, which proved a male, was sold for fifteen pounds.  A mare, brought in the Britannia from the Cape, was valued at forty pounds, and, although aged and defective, was sold twice in the course of a few days for that sum.  It must however be remarked, that in these sales stock itself was generally the currency of the country, one kind of animals being commonly exchanged for another.

Labour was also proportionably high.  For sawing one hundred feet of timber, in their own time, for individuals, a pair of sawyers demanded seven shillings; a carpenter for his day’s work charged three shillings; and for splitting paling for fences, and bringing it in from the woods, they charged from one shilling and six-pence to two shillings and six-pence per hundred.  An officer who had an allotment of one hundred acres of land near the town of Sydney having occasion for a hundred thousand bricks to build a dwelling-house, contracted with a brickmaker and his gang, and for that number of bricks paid him the sum of forty-two pounds ten shillings.  In the fields, for cutting down the timber of an acre of ground, burning it off, and afterwards hoeing it for corn, the price was four pounds.  Five-and-twenty shillings were demanded and paid for hoeing an acre of ground already cleared.

For all this labour, where money was paid, it was taken at its reputed value; but where articles were given in lieu of labour, they were charged according to the prices stated.

The masters of merchantmen, who generally made it their business immediately on their arrival to learn the prices of commodities in the colony, finding them so extravagantly high as before related, thought it not their concern to reduce them to anything like a fair equitable value; but, by asking themselves what must be considered a high price, after every proper allowance for risk, insurance, and loss, kept up the extravagant nominal value which every thing bore in the colony.

CHAPTER XXIV

A murder committed near Parramatta
The Francis sails for Norfolk Island
Provisions
Storm of wind at Parramatta
Crops
A Settlement fixed at the Hawkesbury
Natives
A burglary committed
Samuel Burt emancipated
Death of William Crozier Cook
The watches recovered
The Francis returns from Norfolk Island
Information
The New Zealand natives sent to their own country
Disturbance at Norfolk Island
Court of inquiry at Sydney
The Francis returns to Norfolk Island
Natives troublesome
State of provisions

1794.]