306 EARTHQUAKE. 1788 have gone to Rose Hill to sleep on the boards in a hut." dJviy, The complaint seems to have got worse in the following year, since in March, 1791, he wrote to Lord Grenville Leave to requesting permission to return to England, stating as a horn™ reason that " a complaint in the side, from which, in more than two years, I have been seldom free," had impaired his health so much as to incapacitate him at times for duty. If we had been unfortunate in our live stock in general, I had the satisfaction of seeing the cows and horses thrive ; but the man who attended the former having left them for a short time, thej cattte strayed and were lost. The loss of four cows and two bulls will not awajr* easily be replaced. Pardon, my lord, these tedious relations of robberies and losses ; it is the only means I have of giving your lordship a faint idea of the situation in which I am placed. Of the live stock purchased at the Cape, part died on the passage, and the greatest part of what remained since landing. Having reason to believe that one of the natives had been mur- dered and several wounded, which it is probable occasioned the Reward for attack ou the rushcutters, I have promised to emancipate any con- evidence. ^^^ ^^^^ ^-jj discover the aggressors ; it will, I hope, at least pre- vent anything of the kind in future. A convict who had committed a robbery and absconded the 5th of June returned the 24th almost starved ; he found it impos^ble to subsist in the woods. One of the natives gave him a fish, but then made signs for him to go away. He says he afterwards joined a party of the natives, who would have burned him but that he got Cannibal awav from them : and that he saw the remains of a human body on the fire. In the woods he saw four of the natives who wen* dying, and who made signs for food. This man was tried, pleaded guilty, and suffered with another convict He persisted in the story respecting the natives intending to bum him, and I now be lieve they find the procuring a subsistence very difiSiCTilt^ for little fish is caught. The 22nd of this month (June) we had a slight shock of an earth- Earthquake, quake. It did not last more than two or three seconds. I felt the ground shake under me, and heard a noise that came from the sonth- ward, which I at first took for the report of guns fired at a distance.*
- According to Collins, p. 35, the shock was local, and ao alight thsi
many people did not feel it. On the 17th Jannary, 1801, a verv severe shock was felt in Sydney ; Mann, Present Picture of New South Wales, p^ & Digitized by Google
