210 fowls. The cattle were of the Cape breed, humpy on the shoulders, and long-horned—a fact which it afterwards became of consequence to remember. In the ensuing month it is recorded as a public calamity that two bulls and four cows wandered away from the pickpocket herdsman who had them in charge, and were lost in the woods. In the sequel it was shown that the cattle were better colonists than their owners.
The entrance to Port Jackson, as already partly described, is through projecting capes, or two heads, which conceal and shelter the far extent of the harbour. A channel, about two miles in breadth, opens a land-locked harbour, about fifteen miles in length, of irregular form, the shores jagged with inlets, coves, and creeks, which, when the first adventurers landed, were covered to the water's edge with the finest timber. At the western extremity a current of fresh water mingling with the sea tide gave signs of the winding Paramatta River, navigable for vessels of small burden for eighteen miles.
The settlement was planted on the banks of an inlet or "cove," about half a mile in length, and a quarter in breadth, which received a considerable stream of fresh water at the upper end.
The native blacks, who then swarmed along the whole coast from Botany Bay, and far beyond in either direction, came to meet the white strangers naked, armed with the shield, the spear, and the boomerang, which the settlers at first took for a wooden sword.
From the circumstance of the aborigines not being subject to the authority of any sort of government except that of the strongest man, from the imperfection of their arms, and their mental incapacity for combination, their communications and skirmishes with the white intruders do not occupy that place in the history of the colony which is filled by the Bed Indian tribes in the history of North America, or the semi-civilised Peruvians and Mexicans in that of Spanish South America.
On the 7th February, 1788, the king's commission for the government of the "territory of New South Wales and its dependencies" was read. By this instrument the colony was declared "to extend from the northern extremity of the coast called Cape York, in the latitude of 10° 37′, to the southern extremity of South Cape, in the latitude of 43° 39′, including all adjacent islands within those latitudes, and inland to the westward as far as the 135th degree of east longitude." At the same time were read the letters patent issued under the 27th George III., cap. 56, for establishing courts of civil and criminal judicature in the colony. Under these the governor—or, in his absence,
