The departure of the first fleet of ships for Europe, on the 14th of July, 1788, had been long impatiently expected; and had filled us with anxiety, to communicate to our friends an account of our situation; describing the progress of improvement, and the probability of success, or failure, in our enterprise.  That men should judge very oppositely on so doubtful and precarious an event, will hardly surprise.

Such relations could contain little besides the sanguineness of hope, and the enumeration of hardships and difficulties, which former accounts had not led us to expect.  Since our disembarkation in the preceding January, the efforts of every one had been unremittingly exerted, to deposit the public stores in a state of shelter and security, and to erect habitations for ourselves.  We were eager to escape from tents, where a fold of canvas, only, interposed to check the vertic beams of the sun in summer, and the chilling blasts of the south in winter.  A markee pitched, in our finest season, on an English lawn; or a transient view of those gay camps, near the metropolis, which so many remember, naturally draws forth careless and unmeaning exclamations of rapture, which attach ideas of pleasure only, to this part of a soldier’s life.  But an encampment amidst the rocks and wilds of a new country, aggravated by the miseries of bad diet, and incessant toil, will find few admirers.

Nor were our exertions less unsuccessful than they were laborious.  Under wretched covers of thatch lay our provisions and stores, exposed to destruction from every flash of lightning, and every spark of fire.  A few of the convicts had got into huts; but almost all the officers, and the whole of the soldiery, were still in tents.

In such a situation, where knowledge of the mechanic arts afforded the surest recommendation to notice, it may be easily conceived, that attention to the parade duty of the troops, gradually diminished.  Now were to be seen officers and soldiers not “trailing the puissant pike” but felling the ponderous gum-tree, or breaking the stubborn clod.  And though “the broad falchion did not in a ploughshare end” the possession of a spade, a wheelbarrow, or a dunghill, was more coveted than the most refulgent arms in which heroism ever dazzled.  Those hours, which in other countries are devoted to martial acquirements, were here consumed in the labours of the sawpit, the forge and the quarry*.

[* “The Swedish prisoners, taken at the battle of Pultowa, were transported by the Czar Peter to the most remote parts of Siberia, with a view to civilize the natives of the country, and teach them the arts the Swedes possessed.  In this hopeless situation, all traces of discipline and subordination, between the different ranks, were quickly obliterated.  The soldiers, who were husbandmen and artificers, found out their superiority, and assumed it:  the officers became their servants.”  Voltaire.]