Norfolk Island, gave loyal assistance, and stringent orders were necessary to compel conformity with the General Orders issued by King. Brief extracts from despatches from King to Piper, the commanding officer at Norfolk Island, will show the control which was exercised.
"I am much concerned to know that, notwithstanding Lt.-Gov. Foveaux's conduct in sending ships away that carried spirits from hence to Norfolk Island which did not produce letters from me and my directions to him, you permitted Boston, the supercargo of the Union (American), to dispose of the spirits he was not allowed to sell here. . . . It is therefore my positive order that, when any vessel touches at Norfolk Island from hence, no intercourse whatever, otherwise than relieving their distresses, be had with such ship or vessel unless the master produces letters from the Governor of this settlement."
This was in Jan. 1805. Four months afterwards, when more facts were known, Piper was again censured for having allowed Mr. Boston to exact nineteen shillings a gallon, though for what he had been permitted to sell in Sydney he had been satisfied with nine. King republished his general orders for prohibition or control of spirit-traffic and sent them to Piper.
If the power of the Governor was great, so was his responsibility; and King, like Phillip, was doomed to feel quam arduum quam subjectum fortunæ, regendi cuncta onus.
One of King's early acts proved that he would not shrink from asserting the control of the law in New South Wales. He superseded Hunter on the 28th Sept. 1800, and on the 2nd Oct. a general order referring to convicts directed employers to bring before the magistrates all cases of misconduct by their assigned servants. But the privilege of striking a servant was not willingly abandoned. On the 26th Nov. 1800 a general order announced that it had been represented to the Governor that
"it has been a custom for those to whom the labour of convicts has been assigned to chastise them by horsewhipping and beating them for real or supposed offences; that he felt called upon to put an immediate stop to these practices by referring to the General Order of 2nd Oct.; and as the Governor will not admit of any individual presuming to inflict that punishment which must be openly awarded by a magistrate, he strictly forbids all officers and every person, bond or free, from striking or ill-using any other person in this colony on pain of being proceeded against according to law, or such other notice taken of the offence as the case may require."
