Page:Transportation and colonization.djvu/126

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112
TRANSPORTATION

represented to the governor, from the facts elicited in the course of it, that Watt was an unfit person to be allowed to remain any longer in Sydney, His Excellency ordered him forthwith to Port Macquarie, a subordinate settlement about two hundred miles to the northward.

In the course of his defence in the Supreme Court, Watt had made an outrageous attack on a magistrate of the territory who was in no way connected with the affair: for this outrage he was called to account before the Sydney bench of magistrates, to whose summary jurisdiction he was amenable, as a convict holding a ticket of leave. The outrage, it appeared, was not punishable; but various other charges being exhibited against Watt, the magistrates determined to enter into them at length. The investigation that ensued lasted many days; and in the course of it. Watt's whole manner of life in the colony, and the countenance he had been receiving from certain officers of government, fully appeared, notwithstanding a formidable array of perjury and chicanery of every description which were sedulously employed on his behalf. To the utter astonishment of the colony, however, several of the most respectable magistrates of the territory, who had been concerned in conducting the investigation,