The platform at the west point of the cove was completed during this month. The flag-staff had been for some time erected, and the cannon placed on the platform. A corporal's guard was also mounted daily in the building which had been used as an observatory by Lieutenant Dawes. The mortality during this month had been great, fifty male and four female convicts dying within the thirty days. Five hundred sick persons received medicines at the end of the month. That list however was decreasing. The extreme heat of the weather during the month had not only increased the sick list, but had added one to the number of deaths. On the 4th, a convict attending upon Mr. White, in passing from his house to his kitchen, without any covering upon his head, received a stroke from a ray of the sun which at the time deprived him of speech and motion, and, in less than four-and-twenty hours, of his life. The thermometer on that day stood at twelve o'clock at 94¾ degrees and the wind was at NW. By the dry weather which prevailed our water had been so much affected, beside being lessened by the watering of some of the transports, that a prohibition was laid by the governor on the watering of the remainder at Sydney, and their boats were directed to go to a convenient place upon the north shore. To remedy this evil the governor had employed the stone-mason's gang to cut tanks out of the rock, which would be reservoirs for the water large enough to supply the settlement for some time. December.] On the 3rd of this month the ships _Albemarle_ and _Active_ sailed for India. After their departure several people were missing from the settlement; some whose sentences of transportation had expired, and others who were yet convicts. Previous to their sailing (it having been reported that the seamen intended to conceal such as had made interest among them to get off) the governor instructed the master to deliver any persons whom he might discover to be on board without permission to quit the colony, as prisoners to the commanding officer of the first British settlement they should touch at in India. About this time a boat belonging to Mr. White was taken from its mooring; and it was for a time supposed that she had been taken off by some runaways to get on board one of the ships then about to sail, and afterwards set adrift; but she was found by some gentlemen of the _Gorgon_ the day after their departure, between this harbour and Broken Bay, with two men in her, who on the appearance of the party which found her ran into the woods. The gentlemen left her with a plank knocked out, an oar and the rudder broken, and otherwise rendered useless to the people who ran away with her. They also fell in with a convict, an Irishman, who had been absent five weeks from Parramatta, and who had set off with some others to proceed along the coast in search of another settlement. The boat was brought up a few days afterwards.