kitchens and storerooms for the officers' new barracks, bringing in
timber for rollers for the sloop, and constructing huts at Petersham for
convicts. At Toongabbie the Indian corn was not all gathered, and housing
of that, and preparing the ground for the reception of the next season's
crop, occupied the labouring convicts at that settlement.

Some counterfeit dollars were at this time in circulation; but the
manufacturers of them were not discovered.

August.] The two soldiers who were put into confinement on suspicion of
being parties in a plan to seize one of the long-boats, were tried by a
regimental court-martial on the first day of this month, and one was
acquitted; but Roberts, a drummer, who was proved to have attempted to
persuade another drummer to be of the party, was sentenced to receive
three hundred lashes, and in the evening did receive two hundred and
twenty-five of them. While smarting under the severity with which his
punishment was inflicted, he gave up the names of six or eight of his
brother soldiers as concerned with him, among whom were the two who had
absented themselves the preceding evening. These people, the day
following their desertion, were met in the path to Parramatta, and told
an absurd story of their being sent to the Blue Mountains. They were next
heard of at a settler's (John Nicholls) at Prospect Hill, whose house
they entered forcibly, and, making him and a convict hutkeeper prisoners,
passed the night there. At another settler's they took sixteen pounds of
flour, which they sent by his wife to a woman well known to one of them,
and had them baked into small loaves. They signified a determination not
to be taken alive, and threatened to lie in wait for the game-killers, of
whose ammunition they meant to make themselves masters. These
declarations manifested the badness of their hearts, and the weakness of
their cause; and the lieutenant-governor, on being made acquainted with
them, sent out a small armed party to secure and bring them in, rightly
judging that people who were so ready at expressing every where a
resolution to part with their lives rather than be taken, would not give
much trouble in securing them.

This desertion, and the disaffection of those who meant to take off a
long-boat, was the more unaccountable, as the commanding officer had
uniformly treated them with every indulgence, putting it entirely out of
their power to complain on that head. Spirits and other c