"Before the end of the year, twenty-five ships had reached the shore, with nearly a thousand emigrants, and property worth about fifty thousand pounds. Early in the ensuing year the number of settlers and the quantity of property landed were more than doubled. The tide poured in until there was time to communicate at home the disastrous reception of the settlers. Then indeed it of a necessity subsided, and people awaited with uneasy expectation for further news from the land of promise. The intelligence was distinct enough. The colony was just as if so many people had been shipwrecked, had been able to get ashore, and then depended on the chances of finding food, or of being picked up."
The system on which the distribution of the land was carried out, helped to complete the misfortunes of the settlement. The good land was of no great extent, and what there was of it fell into the hands of those who least knew how to turn it to account, whilst for respectable men of a lower class, to whom agriculture was not an unknown science, there were no allotments left but such as would not repay cultivation.
To fill up the list of disasters, many sheep died of "poison" before the mischievous plants could even be identified; a fine stud of thorough-bred horses is said to have perished for want of water, and the casualties to which live-stock was exposed were further increased by the native habit of spearing it whenever an opportunity presented itself; the apprenticed servants were disheartened and clamoured for the canceling of their indentures, and the gentlemen had to become day-labourers
