] From the reduced state of the salted provisions, it became
necessary (such had often been the preamble of an order) to diminish the
ration of that article weekly to each person, and half the beef and half
the pork was stopped at once. In some measure to make this great
deduction lighter, three pints of peas were added. This circumstance
induced the commanding officer, on the day this alteration took place, to
hire the _Britannia_ to proceed to India for a cargo of salted provisions.
Supplies might arrive before she could return; but the war increased the
chances against us. He therefore took her up at fifteen shillings and
sixpence per ton per month; and, in order to save as much salt meat as
was possible, he directed the commissary to purchase such fresh pork as
the settlers and others might bring in good condition to the store,
issuing two pounds of fresh, in lieu of one of salt meat. During the time
this order continued, a barrow was killed and part sent to the store,
which weighed five hundred pounds, and a sow which weighed three hundred
and thirty-six pounds. They had both been fed a considerable time* on
Indian corn, and, according to the rate they sold at (the pork one
shilling per pound, and the corn five shillings per bushel) could neither
of them have repaid the expence of their feed.

[* The barrow two years and a half, and the sow about two years.]

On the 21st the colonial schooner returned from the Hawkesbury, bringing
upwards of eleven hundred bushels of remarkably fine Indian corn from the
store there. The master again reported his apprehensions that the
navigation of the river would be obstructed by the settlers, who
continued the practice of falling and rolling trees into the stream. He
found five feet less water at the store-wharf than when he was there in
February last, owing to the dry weather which had for some time past
prevailed.

At that settlement an open war seemed about this time to have commenced
between the natives and the settlers; and word was received over-land,
that two people were killed by them; one a settler of the name of Wilson,
and the other a freeman, one William Thorp, who had been left behind from
the _Britannia_, and had hired himself to this Wilson as a labourer. The
natives appeared in large bodies, men, women, and children, provided with
blankets and nets to carry off the corn, of which they appeared as fond
as the natives who lived among us, and seemed determined to ta