Anxiety and curiosity, now strained to the utmost, were obliged to wait the passing of another night; but about three o’clock on Monday the 10th, the wind and weather having both changed, to our great satisfaction we saw the ship William, Mr. William Folger of London master, anchor safely in the cove. With her also came up the Arthur, a small brig of about ninety-five tons, from Bengal.
The William, we found, had sailed from the river Thames on the first of July last, whence she proceeded to Cork, where she took on board a cargo of beef and pork for this colony*; but had not an ounce of flour. She left Ireland on the 20th of September, having waited some weeks for a convoy, (the war with France in which England was engaged having rendered the protection of some of his Majesty’s ships necessary,) and made her passage to this country by the route of Rio de Janeiro. She arrived at that port on the 22nd day of November; left it the third of the following month; and made Van Dieman’s Land on the second of this month. Mr. Folger reported, that his weather from the American coast to this port had been in general good.
[* She had likewise on board a machine for dressing flour; a small quantity of iron; two pairs of millstones and some tools for the smiths; all which were received in the river.]
We learned that Governor Phillip reached England in the Atlantic on the 21st of May last. That ship (which it may be remembered sailed from this place on the 11th of December 1792) passed Cape Horn on the 17th of the following January; anchored at Rio de Janeiro on the 7th of February; and sailed thence on the 4th of March; arriving in the channel without any interruption, save what was given by a French privateer which chased her when within forty-eight hours sail of the land. The natives Bennillong and Yem-mer-ra-wan-nie were well, but not sufficiently divested of the genuine, natural love for liberty and their native country, to prefer London with its pleasures and its abundance to the woods of New South Wales. They requested that their wives might be taught to expect their return in the course of this year. Had it been possible to eradicate in any breast that love for the place of our birth, or where we have lived and grown from infancy to manhood, which is implanted in us by the kind hand of Nature, it surely would have been effected on two natives of New Holland, whose country did not possess a single charm in the eye even of a savage inhabitant of New Zealand.* But we now found that in every breast that sentiment is the same; and that a love for our native country is not the result of her being the seat of arts and arms; the residence of worth, beauty, truth, justice; of all the virtues that adorn and dignify human nature; and of all the pleasures and enjoyments that render life valuable; but that it can be excited even in a land where wretchedness, want, and ignorance have laid their iron hands on the inhabitants, and marked with misery all their days and nights.