at my recommendation the name of Bass's Straits. This was no more than a just tribute to my worthy friend and companion for the extreme dangers and fatigue he had undergone in the first entering it in a whale-boat, and to the correct judgment he had formed from various indications of the existence of a wide opening between Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales."
There is so little to praise in Hunter's career that it is grateful to chronicle his patronage of Flinders and Bass.
He was called upon to interfere in the economy of the settlers in a manner which drew upon him the lash of Sydney Smith in the "Edinburgh Review."
In March 1797 he notified that at the particular wish "of settlers in every part of the colony who have long suffered themselves to be most shamefully imposed upon by such people as they have had occasion to hire," he had thought proper, "in order to deliver them from a practice so injurious to their industry," to obtain information from the settlers as to the advisable rate of wages. He had accordingly fixed "a mean rate which he conceived to be fair and equitable between the farmer and the labourer." The rates per acre for "falling timber," for clearing, burning off, "breaking up new ground" (£1 4s.) chipping in wheat (7s.), planting Indian corn, "hilling" it, reaping (10s. per acre), sawing timber, were severally fixed. Ploughs were not in use,[1] and the hoe was the subduer of the earth. Yearly wages were fixed at £10; a day's wages with board at 1s., without board at 2s. 6d. The prices of axes, hoes (1s. 9d.), sickles, and the rate for hiring a boat to carry grain, were established by order.
In spite of such interference, cultivation increased in a land where starvation had been familiar, and settlers were provided with forced labour. The government, not callous to the taunts thrown out in the House of Commons as to the enormous cost of feeding a colony at the antipodes, urged successive governors to promote agriculture and grazing.
Under these circumstances cultivation of the soil was ostensibly encouraged during Hunter's reign. He still allowed to the farming officers ten convicts for agriculture and three for domestic purposes, although he knew that such an allowance was forbidden. To some settlers who arrived by the Surprise (Oct. 1794) he allowed five convict
- ↑ Vide infra, John Macarthur, Chap. 4.
