Early in the morning of the 16th, the _Friendship_ transport arrived
from Ireland with convicts. She had been fifty days in her passage from
the Cape of Good Hope, where she left his Majesty's ship _Buffalo_
taking on board cattle for the settlement. The convicts arrived in very
good health, though the ship had been sickly previous to her reaching the
Cape.
Many of the prisoners received by this ship and the _Minerva_ were
not calculated to be of much advantage to the settlement; and but little
addition was made by their arrival to the public strength. Several of
them had been bred up in the habits of genteel life, or to professions in
which they were unaccustomed to hard labour. Such must become a dead
weight upon the provision store; for, notwithstanding the abhorrence
which must have been felt for the crimes for which many of them were
transported, yet it was impossible to divest the mind of the common
feelings of humanity, so far as to send a physician, the once respectable
sheriff of a county, a Roman Catholic priest, or a Protestant clergyman
and family, to the grubbing hoe, or the timber carriage.
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