SYDNEY COVE, AUGUST 2O, 1/88. 



FAO-SIMILE OF AN OLD PRINT, FHOM A SKETCH BY GOVERNOR HUNTER 



HISTORICAL REVIEW OF NEW SOUTH WALES. 



EARLY SETTLEMENT. 



j T was in 1779 that the greatest navigator of the eighteenth century, James Cook, 

 fell by the hands of savages in the remote island of Hawaii, and the same year 

 is memorable for the appointment of a Committee of the House of Commons for the 

 purpose ot devising some means for the relief of the gaols, which were then over-crowded 

 with criminals ; and only thirteen years after the date of Cook's landing at Botany Bay, 

 the question of colonizing the territory he had discovered was already a practical one in 

 England. This first attempt to colonize Australia was, moreover, part of a great and 

 beneficent change in the criminal laws of the mother-country. Men were turning away 

 with horror from the reckless sacrifice of human life that had for centuries characterized 

 the administration of justice in " Merrie England " from that ferocity which had hanged 

 two thousand persons annually throughout trie reign of King Henry VIII., and even a 

 greater number in the reign of Queen Elizabeth from that judicial cruelty which boiled 

 a man alive in the public streets of London during the time of Shakespeare. The 

 wretch who stole an article of the value of five shillings forfeited his life as the price 

 of his crime, and took his place with a score of others at Tyburn, on the Monday 

 morning, to be hanged in the presence of a crowd who assembled early, and brought 

 their breakfasts with them in order to witness the spectacle. So outrageous became the 

 number of executions in England that the royal prerogative was continually being called 

 into requisition to commute the death sentence to one of banishment for life. The criminal 

 had to seek some foreign shore, and if he returned summary execution awaited him. 



