time the country was divided into districts, about thirty or
thirty-five in number, over each of which an officer presided as
police magistrate, with a clerk and staff of constables, one of whom
was official flogger, always a convict promoted to the billet for
merit and good behaviour.

New Holland soon became an organised pandemonium, such as the world
had never known since Sodom and Gomorrah disappeared in the Dead Sea,
and the details of its history cannot be written. To mitigate its
horrors the worst of the criminals were transported to Norfolk
Island. The Governor there had not the power to inflict capital
punishment, and the convicts began to murder one another in order to
obtain a brief change of misery, and the pleasure of a sea voyage
before they could be tried and hanged in Sydney. A branch
pandemonium was also established in Van Diemen's Land. This system
was upheld by England for about fifty years.

The 'Britannia', a convict ship, the property of Messrs. Enderby &
Sons, arrived at Sydney on October 14th, 1791, and reported that vast
numbers of sperm whales were seen after doubling the south-west cape
of Van Diemen's Land. Whaling vessels were fitted out in Sydney, and
it was found that money could be made by oil and whalebone as well as
by rum. Sealing was also pursued in small vessels, which were often
lost, and sealers lie buried in all the islands of the southern seas,
many of them having a story to tell, but no story-teller.

Whalers, runaway seamen, shilling-a-month men, and escaped convicts
were the earliest settlers in New Zealand, and were the first to make
peaceful intercourse with the Maoris possible. They built themselves
houses with wooden frames, covered with reeds and rushes, learned to