support of whose wife and children it had long been. After securing him, they took possession of a smaller boat, containing upwards of fifty bushels of wheat; and, finding Cavanagh's the largest and best of the two, they ran out about three or four leagues from the land, when they shifted their prisoners into the smaller boat, and stood off to the Northward; where it was very probable they would lose their boat, she being of such a size, that if they should get her on shore by any accident, they would not be able to launch her again, and must finally perish. Here we find extreme ignorance, accompanied by great cunning, producing cruelty; for nothing less can be said of their abandoning the miserable uninformed companions of their crime. Self-preservation was their plea; but was there not a method left within their reach, which might have preserved the whole? Might they not have returned to Sydney, and thrown themselves upon that mercy which they had so often seen exercised in the settlement. Could it be imagined, that at this day there was existing in a polished civilised kingdom a race of beings (for they do not deserve the appellation of men) so extremely ignorant, and so little humanised as these were, compared with whom the naked savages of the mountains were an enlightened people? Occasional desertions of one or two people at a time had occurred since the establishment of the settlement; but the first convicts who arrived from Ireland in the _Queen_ in the year 1791 went off in numerous bodies, few of whom ever returned. They too were prepossessed with the possibility of penetrating through the woods to China, and imparted the same idea to all of their countrymen who came after them, engaging them in the same act of folly and madness. It was not then to be wondered at, that Wilson, who lately came in from the woods, should, among other articles of information, mention his finding more than fifty skeletons, which the natives assured him had been white men, who had lost their way and perished. This account was corroborated by different European articles which were scattered about, such as knives, old shoes, and other things which were known not to belong to the natives.