The last source of expense to the government which I shall
mention, and which, although now also done away, has been the
means of an astonishing increase in the expenditure of the
colony. From the fertility of its soil, Norfolk Island was for
some time considered a great acquisition to the principal
settlement; but subsequent experience has proved the futility of
this idea, since the price of grain, instead of lowering in
proportion to the additional trouble bestowed on the cultivation
of the soil, remained the same just before its evacuation as it
had been eight years before. As a place for raising swine this
island, indeed, might have proved of much utility, if the
establishment there had been almost entirely reduced, and the
attention of the colony had been confined to this subject, and to
the curing of pork for the consumption of all the other
settlements; but as this method was not adopted, it proved, from
the time of its establishment, a continual check upon the
prosperity of the principal colony, draining those resources
which ought to have been applied to different purposes, where the
hope and probability of some recompense, adequate to the expense,
might have been more sanguine, and less unlikely. Norfolk Island,
so far from returning any proportionate recompense for those
supplies, had not, in the course of thirteen years, sent to New
South Wales property of any description exceeding in value
2000L.; during which period all the expenses of that
island were included in the general account of the whole country
with the Lords Commissioners of his Majesty's Treasury. So far
from being in itself a flourishing colony. Governor Hunter, who
called there in his way to England in 1800, found that the whole
of the public, and numbers of private erections, were in a most