Why Bligh should have been selected to govern the colony at this
particular period it is difficult to understand, unless it was that, as
appears from official correspondence, Sir Joseph Banks pretty well
controlled the making of Australian history at this [Sidenote: 1807]
time--nearly always, if not invariably, to the advantage of Australia.

The condition of affairs ought to have been well understood at home.
Hunter and King had both harped upon it in their despatches, and lamented
their inability to remedy the abuses that had grown up. They had made it
no less plain that the New South Wales Regiment, so far from being a force
with which to back authority, was one of the most dangerous elements in
the rum-trading community of the settlement.

Letters from the Home Office indicate that this was in a measure
understood, but the tenor of the despatches also shows that it was thought
the evils arose less from viciousness of the governed than from want of
backbone in the governors.

Bligh's character for courage and resolution may have led to his selection
as a proper person to lick things into shape. It never seems to have
occurred to his superiors that a man whose ship was taken from him by a
dozen mutinous British seamen, if he were more forceful, resolute,
tyrannical, what you will, than diplomatic in his methods, might lose a
colony in which the colonists were not British sailors, but criminals and
mutinous soldiers.

When Bligh landed, the principal agricultural settlements were on the
banks of the rivers Hawkesbury and Nepean, and the settlers were just
suffering from one of the most disastrous floods that have occurred in a
country where floods are more severe than in most others. There was very