was an enthusiastic farmer; and when he heard of Macarthur's idea,
he sent him one or two from his own flock to be carried out to New South
Wales. They were safely landed at Sydney, Governor King made a grant of
ten thousand acres to Mr. Macarthur, at Camden, and the experiment was
begun. It was not long before the most marked success crowned the
effort, and in the course of a few years the meadows at Camden were
covered with great flocks of sheep, whose wool yielded annually a
handsome fortune to their enterprising owner.

#6. Governor Bligh.#--In 1806 Governor King was succeeded by Captain
Bligh, whose previous adventures have made his name so well known. In
his ship, the _Bounty_, he had been sent by the British Government to
the South Sea Islands for a cargo of bread-fruit trees. But his conduct
to his sailors was so tyrannical that they mutinied, put him, along with
eighteen others, into an open boat, then sailed away, and left him in
the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Bligh was a skilful sailor, and the
voyage he thereupon undertook is one of the most remarkable on record.
In an open boat he carried his little party over 3,500 miles of unknown
ocean to the island of Timor, where they found a vessel that took them
home.

In appointing Captain Bligh to rule the colony, the English Government
spoiled an excellent seaman to make a very inefficient Governor. It was
true that New South Wales contained a large convict population, who
required to be ruled with despotic rigour; yet there were many free
settlers who declined to be treated like slaves and felons, and who soon
came to have a thorough dislike to the new Governor. Not that he was
without kindly feeling; his generous treatment of the Hawkesbury
farmers, who were ruined by a flood in 1806, showed him to have been
warm-hearted in his way; he exerted himself to the utmost, both with
time and money, to alleviate their distress, and received the special
thanks of the English Government for his humanity. And yet his arbitrary
and unamiable manners completely obscured all these better qualities. He
caused the convicts to be flogged without mercy for faults which existed
only in his own imagination; he bullied his officers, and, throughout
the colony, repeated the same mistakes which had led to the mutiny of
the _Bounty_. At the same time, he was anxious to do what he conceived
to be his duty to his superiors in England. He had been ordered to put a
stop to the traffic