to catch, rock oysters, and wild berries; and that the natives had
more than once pursued him when employed in these researches. But very
little credit was given to any account he gave, and it was generally
supposed that he had lived by occasionally visiting and robbing the huts
at Sydney and Parramatta. He had taken to the woods to avoid a punishment
which hung over him, and which he now received.

Early in the month eight settlers from the marines received their grants
of land situated on the north side of the harbour near the Flats, and
named by the governor the Field of Mars.

The convicts employed in cultivating and clearing public ground beyond
Parramatta, having been landed in a weak and sickly state, wore in
general a most miserable and emaciated appearance, and numbers of them
died daily. The reduced ration by no means contributed to their
amendment; the wheat that was raised last year (four hundred and
sixty-one bushels) after reserving a sufficiency for seed, was issued to
them at a pound per man per week, and a pound of rice per week was issued
to each male convict at Sydney.

On Tuesday the 14th the signal was made for a sail, and shortly after the
_Pitt_, Captain Edward Manning, anchored in the cove from England. She
sailed the 17th of last July from Yarmouth Roads, and had rather a long
passage, touching at St. Iago, Rio de Janeiro, and the Cape of Good Hope.
She had on board Francis Grose, esq the lieutenant-governor of the
settlements, and major-commandant of the New South Wales corps, one
company of which, together with the adjutant and surgeon's mate, came out
with him.

She brought out three hundred and nineteen male and forty-nine female
convicts, five children, and seven free women; with salt provisions
calculated to serve that number of people ten months, but which would
only furnish the colony with provisions for forty days. The supply of
provisions was confined to salt meat, under an idea that the colony was
not in immediate want of flour, and that a supply had been sent from
Calcutta, which, together with what had been procured from Batavia, that
which had been sent before from England, and the grain that might have
been raised in the settlements, would be adequate to our consumption for
the present. The dispatches, however, which had been forwarded from this
place by the _Justinian_ in July 1790 having been received by the
secretary of state, what appeared from those communications to be
n