Page:Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land.djvu/30

 erected, and an union jack displayed; when the marines fired several volleys; between which the healths of his Majesty and the Royal family, with success to the new colony, were most cordially drunk. A portable canvas house, brought over for the governor, was erected on the east side of the cove, which was named Sydney. * * * Every person belonging to the settlement being landed, the numbers amounted to 1030 persons. " As soon as the hurry and tumult necessarily attending the disembarkation had a little subsided, the governor caused his Majesty's commission, appointing him to be his Captain-General and Governor-in-chief, in and over the territory of New South Wales and its dependencies, to be publicly read, together with letters patent for establishing courts of civil and criminal judicature in the territory." Such is the recorded account of the first settlement effected, in 1788, in Terra Australis. In 1843, August 4th, we read in the " Australian," one of the Sydney papers*, as follows: " Yesterday (August 3d) pursuant to the Governor's intimation to the Speaker, Mr. M'Leay, on the April, 1839. * Since my arrival in Sydney, I cannot cease asking myself, am I really in the capital of that " Botany Bay " which has been represented as " The Community of Felons," as "the most demoralised colony known in the history of nation*," as " a possession which adds a tarnish rather than a lustre to the British Crown," &c &c.  Let the authors of these and other epithets contained in the numerous works which they wrote on New South Wales congratulate and applaud themselves: my mystification was complete. The evening I effected my disembarkation in Sydney, I did it with all imaginable precaution, leaving my watch and purse behind me, and arming myself with a stick; being resolved to encounter inevitable and imminent dangers with the least possible risk!! * * * I found, however, on that night, in the streets of Sydney, a decency and a quiet which I have never witnessed in any other of the ports of the United Kingdom. No drunkenness, no sailors' quarrels, no appearances of prostitution, were to be seen. George Street, the Regent Street of Sydney, displayed houses and shops modelled after the