" This is true so far as
it goes, but Barton himself shows what finding something to eat meant in
those days, and Phillip's despatches prove that, although the food
question was the practical every-day problem to be grappled with, he, in
the midst of the most harassing famine-time, was able to look beyond when
he wrote these words: "This country will yet be the most valuable
acquisition Great Britain has ever made."
In future chapters we shall go more particularly into the early life of
the colony and see how the problems that harassed Phillip's administration
continued long after he had returned to England; we shall then see how
immeasurably the first governor was superior to the men who followed him.
And it is only by such comparison that a just estimate of Phillip can be
made, for he was a modest, self-contained man, making no complaints in his
letters of the difficulties to be encountered, making no boasts of his
success in overcoming them. The three sea-captains who in turn followed
him did their best to govern well, taking care in their despatches that
the causes of their non-success should be duly set forth, but these
documents also show that much of their trouble was of their own making. In
the case of Phillip, his letters to the Home Office show, and every
contemporary writer and modern Australian [Sidenote: 1801-14]
historian proves, that in no single instance did a lack of any quality of
administrative ability in him create a difficulty, and that every problem
of the many that during his term of office required solution was solved by
his sound common-sense method of grappling with it.
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