But there was an individual, whose name and history are upon record, to whom the claim of a yet earlier settlement, as a free person, must be assigned. His history is instructive, and may be worth repeating, since it is, probably, a specimen of what afterwards occurred in a vast number of instances. Philip Schoeffer was a German, who had been sent out with the first fleet that ever sailed to New South Wales, in the capacity of an agriculturist, and chiefly with a view to the cultivation of tobacco (to supersede that of Virginia,) in the proposed settlement. His first grant of land was one hundred and forty acres; but, unhappily, he fell into habits of intemperance, and got rid of it all. Afterwards, he obtained another grant of fifty acres, in what now forms a very valuable situation in the town of Sydney; but this he was induced to give up to the Colonial Government for public purposes, about the year 1807, receiving in return twenty gallons of rum, which were then worth 60_l._ and a grant of the same extent with his former one, but situated at Pitt Water, one of the inlets of Broken Bay--a large harbour to the northward of Port Jackson. Schoeffer then married a wife, a Scotch woman and a convict, and settled on his farm at Pitt Water, where he lived many years; but old age, poverty, and intemperance induced him to sell it by piecemeal, and he died at last in the benevolent asylum or colonial poor-house. This short history may serve to show upon what mere accidents the foundation of wealth frequently depends, and especially in a new country; for, if the German could only have kept his farm of fifty acres in Sydney for about thirty years longer, he or his successors might actually have sold it for 100,000_l._!