The Indians Who Live On Its Banks Are Numerous,
And Behaved Attentively In A Variety Of Instances While Our People
Remained Among Them.
CHAPTER XIII.
Transactions at Port Jackson in the Months of April and May.
As winter was fast approaching, it became necessary to secure ourselves
in quarters, which might shield us from the cold we were taught to expect
in this hemisphere, though in so low a latitude. The erection of barracks
for the soldiers was projected, and the private men of each company undertook
to build for themselves two wooden houses, of sixty-eight feet in length,
and twenty-three in breadth. To forward the design, several saw-pits
were immediately set to work, and four ship carpenters attached to
the battalion, for the purpose of directing and completing this necessary
undertaking. In prosecuting it, however, so many difficulties occurred,
that we were fain to circumscribe our original intention; and, instead
of eight houses, content ourselves with four. And even these, from the badness
of the timber, the scarcity of artificers, and other impediments, are,
at the day on which I write, so little advanced, that it will be well,
if at the close of the year 1788, we shall be established in them.
In the meanwhile the married people, by proceeding on a more contracted scale,
were soon under comfortable shelter. Nor were the convicts forgotten;
and as leisure was frequently afforded them for the purpose, little edifices
quickly multiplied on the ground allotted them to build upon.
But as these habitations were intended by Governor Phillip to answer only
the exigency of the moment, the plan of the town was drawn, and the ground
on which it is hereafter to stand surveyed, and marked out. To proceed
on a narrow, confined scale, in a country of the extensive limits we possess,
would be unpardonable: extent of empire demands grandeur of design.
That this has been our view will be readily believed, when I tell the reader,
that the principal street in our projected city will be, when completed,
agreeable to the plan laid down, two hundred feet in breadth, and all the rest
of a corresponding proportion. How far this will be accompanied with adequate
dispatch, is another question, as the incredulous among us are sometimes
hardy enough to declare, that ten times our strength would not be able
to finish it in as many years.
Invariably intent on exploring a country, from which curiosity promises
so many gratifications, his Excellency about this time undertook an expedition
into the interior parts of the continent. His party consisted of
eleven persons, who, after being conveyed by water to the head of the harbour,
proceeded in a westerly direction, to reach a chain of mountains,
which in clear weather are discernible, though at an immense distance,
from some heights near our encampment. With unwearied industry they continued
to penetrate the country for four days; but at the end of that time,
finding the base of the mountain to be yet at the distance of more than
twenty miles, and provisions growing scarce, it was judged prudent to return,
without having accomplished the end for which the expedition had been
undertaken.
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