, and was the property
of Mr. Hingston, late master of the _Hillsborough_, and two others,
free people belonging to the settlement.]

Several of her crew having behaved in a most insolent and mutinous manner
to the officer of the _Reliance_, having armed themselves against
the constables with cutlasses, and one of them having presented a musket
at the chief constable, they were secured, ordered to be punished on
board their own ship, and afterwards turned on shore. But it was
necessary to do something more than this; and, a criminal court being
assembled for the purpose, the master of the ship was brought to trial,
charged with aiding and abetting a female convict to make her escape from
the colony. As the offence consisted in aiding a convict, it was
requisite to prove that such was the person found on board his ship; but,
upon referring to a list of the prisoners who were embarked in the
_Royal Admiral_, the ship in which Arm Holmes had been sent out to
New South Wales, no specific term of transportation was found annexed to
her name. On the question then, whether the master had aided a convict in
making an escape, he was acquitted, it not being possible by any document
to prove that Holmes was at that moment a convict. But the master was
reprehensible in concealing any person whatever in his ship, and ought to
have felt the awkwardness of his situation, in being brought before a
court for the breach of an order expressly issued a short time before to
guard him and others against the offence that he had committed.

When the _Hillsborough_ was searched, not less than thirty convicts
were found to have been received on board, against the orders and without
the knowledge of the officers, and secreted by the seamen. This ship and
the _Hunter_, shortly after these transactions, sailed on their
respective voyages.

But although, by the measures which had been adopted, it was supposed
that none of these people had escaped in the ships, yet many were still
lurking in the woods. About this time a young ox was missing from the
government stock-yard at Toongabbie, and there was every reason to
suppose had been driven away and slaughtered by some of those wretches.
In the hope of discovering the offender, a notice was published, holding
out a conditional emancipation, and permission to become a settler, to
any convict for life, who would come forward with the information
necessary to convict the persons concerned in this destru