sing it with advantage in another. These people proved but
indifferent settlers; sailors and soldiers, seldom bred in the habits of
industry, but ill brooked the personal labour which they found was
required from them day after day, and month after month. Men who from
their infancy had been accustomed to have their daily subsistence found
them were but ill calculated to procure it by the sweat of their brows,
and must very unwillingly find that without great bodily exertions they
could not provide it at all. A few months experience convinced them of
the truth of these observations, and they grew discontented; as a proof
of which they wrote a letter to the judge-advocate, to be submitted to
the governor, stating, as a subject of complaint among other grievances,
that the officers of the settlement bred stock for their own use, and
requesting that they might be directed to discontinue that practice, and
purchase stock of them.

Very few of the convicts at Norfolk Island whose terms of transportation
had expired were found desirous of becoming permanent settlers; the sole
object with the major part appearing to be, that of taking ground for the
purpose of raising by the sale of the produce a sum sufficient to enable
them to pay for their passages to England. The settler to benefit this
colony, the _bona fide_ settler, who should be a man of some property, must
come from England. He is not to be looked for among discharged soldiers,
shipwrecked seamen, or quondam convicts.

Governor King finding, after trying every process that came within his
knowledge for preparing and dressing the flax-plant, that unless some
other means were devised, it never would be brought to the perfection
necessary to make the canvas produced from it an object of importance,
either as an article of clothing for the convicts or for maritime
purposes, proposed to Mr. Ebor Bunker, the master of the _William and
Ann_, who had some thoughts of touching at Dusky Bay in New Zealand, to
procure him two natives of that country, if they could be prevailed on to
embark with him, and promised him one hundred pounds if he succeeded,
hoping from their perfect knowledge of the flax-plant, and the process
necessary to manufacture it into cloth, that he might one day render it a
valuable and beneficial article to his colony; but Captain Bunker had
never returned.

Norfolk Island had been visited by all the whalers which sailed from this
port on that fishery. The