Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/74
sible that the ships by which I have now the honour of writing may be the first to arrive," he carefully recapitulated the heads of his former letters. A dreary interval was to elapse before he received answers to any of them.
It was not until 1789 that the gallant Riou was despatched with supplies in the Guardian, which were arrested (23rd Dec.) by an iceberg. Even this abortive attempt to relieve them was for many months unknown to the starving colonists, and Phillip resorted to stringent means in order to husband the scanty stores he possessed. He determined to send H.M.S. Sirius to Africa for food, and told Lord Sydney (Oct., 1788), "We at present depend entirely on provisions being sent from England, and I beg leave to observe that if a ship should be lost in the passage, it might be a very considerable time before it could be known in England."
The Sirius sailed, under Captain J. Hunter, R.N., to the Cape of Good Hope. The passage from Australia to Africa was then untried. It was not known that Bass's Straits separated Van Diemen's Land from New Holland, and Hunter decided to pass to the southward of New Zealand and round Cape Horn. The voyage to the Cape lasted from the 2nd Oct. to the 2nd Jan., and the dreaded scurvy appeared among the crew, who had "for thirteen or fourteen months not tasted fresh provisions of any kind, nor had they touched a single blade of vegetables." At the Cape only did Captain Hunter learn any of the political events which had occurred in Europe after the departure of the first fleet for New South Wales, two years before. There also he heard that Lieut. Shortland, who had sailed from Sydney in July 1788, had reached Batavia in a distressed condition, with but one ship, the Alexander, the other transports, with the exception of the Friendship, having lost his company. Scurvy had raged in the Alexander and her consort, and the latter struck on a reef on the coast of Borneo. The Alexander had lost "eight men, and was reduced to two men in a watch, only four seamen and two boys being at all fit for duty." "The Friendship had only five men not disabled." "In this melancholy state of both ships, the western monsoon being expected soon to set in, it was indispensably necessary to give up one for the sake of