Bligh’s character for courage and resolution may have led to his selection as a proper person to lick things into shape.  It never seems to have occurred to his superiors that a man whose ship was taken from him by a dozen mutinous British seamen, if he were more forceful, resolute, tyrannical, what you will, than diplomatic in his methods, might lose a colony in which the colonists were not British sailors, but criminals and mutinous soldiers.

When Bligh landed, the principal agricultural settlements were on the banks of the rivers Hawkesbury and Nepean, and the settlers were just suffering from one of the most disastrous floods that have occurred in a country where floods are more severe than in most others.  There was very little money in the colony, and the settlers carried on a legitimate system of barter by which they exchanged with each other their grain and herds.  But the floods, of course, threw this system somewhat out of gear, and he who after the floods had escaped without much damage to his property had a pretty good pull upon his neighbour whose worldly belongings had been carried away by the swollen waters.

Bligh, there is no doubt, did the right thing at this time.  He slaughtered a number of the Government cattle, dividing them among the more distressed colonists; and, to encourage them to go cheerfully to work to cultivate their land again and to become independent of their fellow-settlers, he promised to buy for the King’s stores all the wheat they could dispose of after the next harvest, and to pay for it at a reasonable price.

Dr. Lang, in his History of New South Wales, published [Sidenote:  1834] about 1834, relates how an old settler said to him, “Them were the days, sir, for the poor settler; he had only to tell the governor what he wanted, and he was sure to get it from the stores, whatever it was, from a needle to an anchor, from a penn’orth o’ pack-thread to a ship’s cable.”

This arrangement was not conducive to the interests of the rum traders, who had been in the habit of purchasing grain and compelling the growers to accept spirits in payment for it.  It operated still further against them when Bligh made a tour of the colony, took a note of each settler’s requirements and of what the settler was likely to be able to produce from his land; then, according to what the governor thought the farmer was likely to be able to supply, Bligh gave an order for what was most needed by the man from the King’s stores.

Of course this was taking a heavy responsibility upon himself.  Even colonial governments nowadays, elected by “one-man-one-vote,” scarcely go so far, but the state of the settlement must be remembered.  There were no shops then, and the general public of the colony, with very few exceptions, was made up of Government officials and prisoners of the Crown.  But the step was a serious interference with trade—­that is, the rum trade; in consequence those in “the ring” were exasperated, and its members only wanted Bligh to give them an opportunity to retaliate upon and ruin him.