AND HIS STAFF. 185 They left the island in February, 1791, and on reaching 1787-W Sydney, Hxmter learned that Phillip had made a contract with the master of the Dutch snow, then lying in the har- bour, for the passage of the officers and crew to England — a piece of information which I did not by any means feel a pleasure in hearing ; for, anxious as I was to reach England as Doubtful soon as possible, I should with much patience rather have waited the arrival of an English ship, than embarked under the direction or at the disposal of a foreigner. The mistrust of foreigners shown in this instance seems National to have been a common feeling among English officers at cations. the time. When King reached the Cape of Good Hope on his way to England in October, 1790, he declined a passage in a French frigate because he had heard rumours of a com- plication between England and Spain. This state of sus- picion was more than justified by the cruel treatment which Flinders met with from the French, when he put in to the Mauritius in distress in 1803. King had cautioned him strongly before he sailed against going there. Hunter, however, was obliged to resign himself to his fate, and shortly afterwards sailed in the Dutchman for England via Batavia and the Cape of Good Hope, reaching his des- tination in April, 1792, after a voyage of nearly thirteen a thirteen months. A letter which he addressed to the Lords of the Ad- voyage to miralty on his return, advocating the passage by Cape Horn on the homeward voyage, in preference to that by the Cape of Good Hope, or northward via Batavia, throws a curious light on the state of navigation at the time it was written. In the curious group gathered together on the shores of Sydney Cove, there was but one man with whom Phillip was connected by old associations; and that was the second lieutenant of the Sirius, Philip Gidley King, who had sailed ^,"7"^^^^ with him on a cruise to the East Indies in a frigate he commanded some six years before the First Fleet left the Channel. There was a difference of twenty years between them in point of age ; Phillip being in his fiftieth and King Digitized by Google
