These expenses were certainly great, and had been considerably increased.  The settlement was at this time much in want of many necessary articles of life; and when these were brought by speculators and traders who occasionally touched there, they demanded more than five hundred per cent above what the same articles could have been sent out for from England, with every addition of freight, insurance, etc.  They saw the wants of the colony, and availed themselves of its necessities.

April.] On the first of this month the criminal court sat for the trial of a soldier belonging to the regiment, who had a few days before stabbed a seaman of the Reliance, who insulted him when sentinel at one of the wharfs at Sydney.  The man died of the wound; the soldier, being called upon to answer for his death, proved to the satisfaction of the court, that it had been occasioned by the intemperance of the seaman, and he was accordingly found to have committed a justifiable homicide.

This accident was the effect of intoxication, to which a few days after another victim was added, in the person of a female, who was either the wife or companion of Simon Taylor, a man who had been considered as one of the few industrious settlers which the colony could boast of.  They had both been drinking together to a great excess; and in that state they quarrelled, when the unhappy man, in a fit of madness and desperation, put an untimely end to her existence.  He was immediately taken into custody, and reserved for trial.

To this pernicious practice of drinking to excess, more of the crimes which disgraced the colony were to be ascribed than to any other cause; and more lives where lost through this than through any other circumstance; for the settlement had ever been free from epidemical or fatal diseases.  How much then was the importation of spirits to be lamented!  How much was it to be regretted, that it had become the interest of any set of people to vend them!

Several robberies which at this time had been committed were to be imputed to the same source.

A new enemy to agriculture made its appearance in this month.  A destructive grub-worm was discovered in several parts of the cultivated ground; and at the Hawkesbury a caterpillar had commenced its ravages wherever it found any young grain just shooting out of the earth.  This occasioned some delay in sowing the government ground.

It having been for several days reported, that the crews of two boats, which had been permitted to go to Hunter’s River for a load of coals, had been cut off by the natives, the governor ordered his whale boat to be well armed, and to proceed thither in quest of the boats and their crews; sending in her Henry Hacking, a person on whom he could depend.  Upon his return, he informed the governor, that on his arrival he found an attempt had been made to burn the smaller boat, which had had three men in her, who were each provided with a musket.  The boat