same character with that so long inhabited by Robinson Crusoe, we had
prudently provided ourselves with all the necessaries and even
non-necessaries of life in such a region. Our tool chests would have
suited an army of pioneers; several distinguished ironmongers of the
city of London had cleared their warehouses in our favour of all the
rubbish which had lain on hand during the last quarter of a century;
we had hinges, bolts, screws, door-latches, staples, nails of all
dimensions -- from the tenpenny, downwards -- and every other
requisite to have completely built a modern village of reasonable
extent. We had tents, Macintosh bags, swimming-belts, several sets
of sauce-pans in graduated scale, (we had here a distant eye to
kangaroo and cockatoo stews,) cleavers, meat-saws, iron skewers, and
a general apparatus of kitchen utensils that would have satisfied the
desires of Monsieur Soyer himself. Then we had double and
single-barrelled guns, rifles, pistols, six barrels of Pigou and
Wilkes' gunpowder; an immense assortment of shot, and two hundred
weight of lead for bullets.

Besides the several articles already enumerated, we had provided
ourselves with eighteen months' provisions, in pork and flour,
calculating that by the time this quantity was consumed, we should
have raised enough to support our establishment out of the soil by
the sweat of our brows. And thus from sheer ignorance of colonial
life, we had laid out a considerable portion of our capital in the
purchase of useless articles, and of things which might have been
procured more cheaply in the colony itself. Nor were we the only
green-horns that have gone out as colonists: on the contrary,
nine-tenths of those who emigrate, do so in perfect ignorance of the
country they are about to visit and the life they are destined to
lead. The fact is, Englishmen, as a body know nothing and care