Here ends this account of the naval pioneers of Australia. We have already
said that this work is biographical rather than historical. All that we
have attempted is not to sketch the progress of the colony--as a colony,
for the first twenty years of its existence, no element of progress was in
it--but to show how certain naval officers, in spite of the difficulties
of the penal settlement days, in spite very often of their own unfitness
for this to them strange service, did their work well, not perhaps always
governing wisely, but holding to ground won in such circumstances and by
such poor means as men with more brains and less "grit" would have
abandoned as untenable.
Arthur Phillip landed in a desert, obtained a footing on the land, and
when he left it, left behind him a habitable country; Hunter and King
followed him and held the country, though nearly every man's hand was
against them, and the industrious and the virtuous among their people
could be numbered by the fingers of the hand. Yet these men and their
officers dotted the coast-line with their discoveries, and by what they
wrought in the direction of sea exploration more than made up for what
they lacked in the art of civil governing. Bligh honestly endeavoured in a
blundering way to accomplish that which only the sharp lesson of his
mistake made possible; Macquarie, backed by a regiment, began his
administration with concessions, and continued for many years to govern
the colony, chiefly for the benefit of the emancipists instead of for its
officials.
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