Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/177

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BRYANT, IN A BOAT, ESCAPES TO TIMOR, 1791.

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will be rendered more comfortable; and even now, all things considered, thank God I have no reason to complain."

Royal instructions directed Phillip to "enforce a due observance of religion" and to "take such steps for the due celebration of public worship as circumstances will permit." When he sent King to command at Norfolk Island he directed him "to cause the prayers of the Church of England to be read with all due solemnity every Sunday," and one ought not lightly to give credit to aspersions against a man so dutiful and upright as Phillip.

Johnson was acquainted with Wilberforce and was the close friend of the Rev. John Newton, some admirable letters from whom (to Johnson) are printed in the "Historical Records of New South Wales, Part II." In one of them he expresses a hope that Phillip's successor will treat Johnson better than Phillip had treated him.

Though Phillip had a reputation for humanity, the law was a terror to evil-doers. Executions of robbers of the public stores have been mentioned. In Nov. 1789 a woman died on the scaffold for breaking into the hut of a convict by day and stealing apparel. It was not to be wondered at that the prisoners strove to flee from their place of exile. In Sept. 1790 five of them escaped under the guidance of John Tarwood. They took a small boat or punt from Parramatta, and Collins says (page 186) that "they no doubt pushed directly out upon that ocean which, from the wretched state of the boat wherein they trusted themselves, must have proved their grave."^[1]

Bryant, a native of the west of England, bred a fisherman, and employed by Phillip as Government fisherman, was more successful in 1791. His peculations of fish having been detected he was strictly watched, but still

↑ The compiler of history here finds an instance of the difficulty of relying on an isolated passage in gathering his facts, for in a later part of Collins' work (p. 245) we are told that H.M.S. Providence, in 1795, bound from the coast of Brazil and driven northward in her voyage to Sydney, took shelter at Port Stephens, and there "found and received on board four white people (if four miserable, naked, dirty, and smoke-dried men could be called white), runaways from this settlement. They told a melancholy tale of their sufferings, but "spoke in high terms of the pacific disposition and gentle manners of the natives." They were the men whose entombment in the ocean Collins had previously noticed as undoubted.

[1] The compiler of history here finds an instance of the difficulty of relying on an isolated passage in gathering his facts, for in a later part of Collins' work (p. 245) we are told that H.M.S. Providence, in 1795, bound from the coast of Brazil and driven northward in her voyage to Sydney, took shelter at Port Stephens, and there "found and received on board four white people (if four miserable, naked, dirty, and smoke-dried men could be called white), runaways from this settlement. They told a melancholy tale of their sufferings, but "spoke in high terms of the pacific disposition and gentle manners of the natives." They were the men whose entombment in the ocean Collins had previously noticed as undoubted.

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