Portsmouth Telegraph or Mottley's Naval and Military Journal

Monday August11 1800

Botany Bay

A letter from Sydney Cove, Botany Bay, dated December 19 1799 says " You will be pleased to learn the success of the Whalers; those of any kind of perseverance or knowledge have done vastly well. The Britannia, in less than six months, during which time she had been five times in port on this coast, procured one hundred and twenty three tons of very superior spermaceti oil. The Eliza, another ship,. got upwards of ninety tons, and Capt. Brunker, who, you know, is an excellent whaler, is just sailed, and I doubt not but he will very soon fill his ship, as the season is favourable. Our crops this season promise to reward the Governor's unceasing efforts for the good of the Settlement, and to reward the industry of the husbandmen; for, to a certainty, if no accident happens, we shall grown wheat enough this year to serve us three, a circumstance so happy, that it will enable Governor Hunter ever after to have one year's grain in store, and which will prevent us from hereafter experiencing such dreadful ideas of famine as we have hitherto done.

We have made some cloth from our sheep's wool (which with goats, hogs, poultry, nay, every thing else, thrives well), and linen from the flax plant tolerably good samples of which the Governor sends home. A very large party is now forming in order, if possible, to drive the wild cows into an enclosure made by rocks, with only one large opening between them; if success attends us, we shall have enough of cattle, which is the thing now most wanted. By wild cows I mean those produced by the four cows and a young bull that strayed away from us about six weeks after our landing, and which now amount to nearly two hundred, all of them as wild as the cows of Madagascar"