By these ships we learned that the Surprise transport, with male and female convicts for this country, was left by them lying at Spithead ready for sea, and that they might be shortly expected.  The Kitty, which sailed from this place in June 1793, had arrived safely at Cork on the 5th of February last, not losing any of her passengers or people in so long a voyage and in such a season.

His Majesty’s appointment of John Hunter esq to be our governor, in the room of Captain Phillip who had resigned his office, we found had been officially notified in the London Gazette of the 5th of February last.  Mr. Phillip’s services, we understood, were remunerated by a pension of five hundred pounds per annum.

The Irish prisoners were now again beginning to be troublesome; and some of them being missing from labour, it was directly rumoured that a plan was in agitation to seize the boat named the Cumberland, which had recently sailed with provisions for the settlers at the Hawkesbury.  By several it was said, that she had actually been attacked without the Heads, and carried.  Notice was therefore immediately sent overland to the river, to put the people in the boat on their guard, and to return should she reach that settlement safely:  an armed long-boat was also sent to protect her passage round.  After a few days suspense we found, that while providing against any accident happening to the Cumberland, some of the Irish prisoners at Parramatta had stolen from the wharf at that place a six-oar’d boat belonging to Lieutenant Macarthur, with which they got without the harbour undiscovered.  She was found however, some days after, at Botany Bay.  The people who were in her made some threats of resistance, but at length took to the woods, leaving the boat with nearly every thing that they had provided for their voyage.  From the woods they visited the farms about Sydney for plunder, or rather for sustenance; but one of them being fired at and wounded, the rest thought it their wisest way to give themselves up.  They made no hesitation in avowing that they never meant to return; but at the same time owned that they supposed they had reached Broken Bay instead of Botany Bay, ignorant whether it lay to the northward or southward of this harbour.  The man who had been wounded died at the hospital the next day; and his companions appeared but very ill able to provide for themselves, even by those means which had occasioned our being troubled with them in this country.

On the 17th, we were visited by a violent gale of wind at southwest, which blew so strong, that the Resolution was at one time nearly on shore.  At Parramatta, during the gale, a public granary, in which were upwards of two thousand four hundred bushels of shelled maize or Indian corn, caught fire, through the carelessness of some servants who were boiling food for stock close to the building (which was a thatched one), and all the corn, together with a number of fine hogs the property of an individual, were destroyed.