1802.
July.
expense to government. But with these exceptions, I was obliged to leave the refreshment of the people to their own individual exertions; assisting them with the payment due for savings of bread since leaving the Cape of Good Hope, and the different artificers with the money earned by their extra services in refitting the ship. Fish are usually plentiful at Port Jackson in the summer, but not in the winter time; and our duties were too numerous and indispensable to admit of sending people away with the seine, when there was little prospect of success; a few were, however, occasionally bought along-side, from boats which fished along the coast.
In purchasing a sea stock for the cabin, I paid £3. a head for sheep, weighing from thirty to forty pounds when dressed. Pigs were bought at 9d. per pound, weighed alive, geese at 10s. each, and fowls at 3s.; and Indian corn for the stock cost 5s. a bushel.
To complete the ship's provisious, I entered into a contract for 30,000 pounds of biscuit, 8000 pounds of flour, and 156 bushels of kiln-dried wheat; but in the mean time, the ship Coromandel brought out the greater part of the twelvemonths' provisions, for which I had applied on sailing from Spithead; and the contractor was prevailed upon to annul that part of the agreement relating to flour and wheat. The biscuit cost 33s. per hundred pounds; and considering that the colony was at short allowance, and that the French ships were to be supplied, it was a favourable price. From two American vessels which arrived, I purchased 1483 gallons of rum at 6s. 6d. per gallon; which, with what remained of our former stock, was a proportion for twelve months. In other respects our provisions were completed from the quantity sent out from England; and the remaining part was lodged in the public stores, in charge of the commissary, until our return.
In addition to the melancholy loss of eight officers and men, at the entrance of Spencer's Gulph, and the previous deficiency of four in the complement, I found it necessary to discharge the man who had been bitten by a seal at Kanguroo Island, as also a marine,