NEAE SYDNEY COVB. 359 rowed their galleys np the Thames. The traveller who 1788 now-a-days crosses the river in a railway train looks out upon a country to which he might be excused for applying ««^ Mti»«v Darwin's lines — Embellished villas crown the landscape scene, Farms wave with gold and orchards blush between. If the poet's description is not literally true in the present day^ it is at least sufficiently so to justify the glowing lan- guage in which he sought to represent the future of Sydney Cove. When he wrote^ the land lay there in its native state^ waiting only to be cleared, drained^ and cultivated in order to realise the golden farms and blushing orchards of his imagination. But there lay the difficulty. The labour of cicMing and clearing the ground round the Camp had formed the subject of constant complaint during the first year of Phillip's administration ; and while it formed so serious a stumbling block in his path, it is not surprising that no attempt was made to penetrate further inland for the purpose of clearing and cultivating the backwoods. The natural diffi- culties surrounding the cultivation of the soil in a new country were never; perhaps, encountered in such force as they were in his time, peculiarly aggravated as they were by the fact that his. farm labourers were men who had never handled a spade or followed a plough's taiL^
- The descriptioii of the oonntry on the western shore of Botany Bay,
^ven by P^ron, who visited it in 1S02, will give some idea of its appearanoe m Phillip's time : — ^A mesure qu'on se rapproche de Botany Bay, le terrain s'abaisse de plus en plus, et bientOt on arrive k des mar^cMes dangerenz, formds et entretenus par les eaux saum&tres de la riviere & Cook vers le Nord, et de la riviere George vers le Sud. Ces marais sont tellement ^tendus et quelqnefois si profonds, qu'il est impossible, en diffdrens endroita, de les francnir pour arriver jusqu'k la mer. Sur leurs bords, et toot le long des deux rivieres dont je viens de parler, la v^^tation est trte-aotive ; mille esp^ces d'arbres et d'arbustes, press^es k la surface da sol, donnent k oette partie de la oontr^e qui nous occupe un aspect enchanteur, et lui prdtent une apparenoe de f^conditd si grande, que le capitaine Cook et ses illustres compagnons y furent tromp^s eux-memes. U s'en faut pourtant beauooup que cette bale tant c^l^br^e par ces navigateurs, ait justifi^ les esp^rances que leur brillante description en avoit fait concevoir. Obstru^ par de grands bancs de vase, ouverte aux vents de I'Est par le Sud, elle ne pr^sente pas k la navigation touts la stbret^ dont celle-ci peut avoir besoin dans certains cas, et la nature mar^cageuse du sol des environs le rend k la fois tr^s insalubre et peu propre aux cultures ordinaires. Aussi le commo- Digitized by Google
