26 June 1802

N. S. Wales 1

Times 26 June 1802.

1. "According to the last accounts from New South Wales "dated in November,

(1801 the Colony was in a flourishing state "At Port Jackson

the crops were very luxuriant and beginning "to be cut down." A

confirmation of what I have already stated. and never doubted that here as

elsewhere God Almighty has done his part of the business. There are

flowers in the neighbourhood of Botany Bay — and these flowers

blow. Vegetables and even Animals when put there

and multiply there as elsewhere.

"Governor King had opened a communication with Otaheite "for the purpose of

supplying the Colony with pork, "in which he had been singularly

successful." What? Pork from Otaheite? by a voyage of a month's length?

Two years ago M r King was in thrown

into ecstasies by at the accounts of improvement and

prosperity in the land of peace and plenty. My expectations on this head

governed as they were by his reports

and exclamati figures of rhetoric speech, and not by

any figures of arithmetic, were at the time too sanguine, for with all my

prejudices against the Colony I could not have conceived but that by this

time it would have been fully stocked. Yet so far is it from being so

— or near being so that a new project for

importing the means of subsistence by a four or five

weeks voyage is reported as a happy circumstance.