<P> During the first year of the settlement, which was also called "Sydney" like its parent, more convicts and soldiers were sent to the island from New South Wales . A second village was started at Ball Bay, named after the captain of HMS Supply, Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball . On 8 January 1789, the first child was born, Norfolk King, the son of Philip Gidley King and a convict, Ann Inett . (Norfolk King went on to become the first British Naval officer born in Australia, and was a Lieutenant, commanding the schooner Ballahoo when an American privateer captured her .) </P> <P> A "Letter from an Officer of Marines at New South Wales, 16 November 1788", published in the London newspaper, The World, 15 May 1789, reported the glowing description of the island and its prospects by Philip Gidley King, but also drew attention to the fatal defect of the lack of a safe port: "The said Island lies near Port Jackson, and is nearly as large as the Isle of Wight . Lieutenant King, who was sent with a detachment of marines and some convicts, to settle there, gives the most flattering portrayal of it . The island is fully wooded . Its timber is in the opinion of everyone the most beautiful and finest in the world...they are most suitable for masts, yards, spars and such . The New Zealand flax - plant grows there in abundance . European grains and seeds also thrive wonderfully well on Norfolk Island . It only lacks a good port and suitable landing places, without which the island is of no use, but with them it would be of the greatest importance for Great Britain . How far these deficiencies can be improved by art and the hand of man, time must decide ." </P> <P> An idealised vision of the new British settlement was given in the novel by Therese Forster, Abentheuer auf einer Reise nach Neu - Holland (Adventures on a Voyage to New Holland), published in the German women's magazine, Flora for 1793 and 1794: </P> <P> We went towards the centre of this small island where at the foot of a round hill a crystal - clear river rushes forth, dividing up further on into several arms . Towards North and West the hill is covered with the most beautiful ploughed fields all the way down to the sea . The sight of these great flax fields is one of the loveliest I ever beheld . The slender stalks, of the most beautiful green and reaching far above a man's head, bent in the gentle breeze that blew from the sea . Their red blossoms, shining like rubies, danced in the green waves . The top of the hill and the whole of the south and east sides are covered with enormous pines whose dark green is enhanced by a pleasant foreground of cabbage palms and banana trees, and I also observed a low bush among them the fruit of which resembles our red currants but is much larger and hangs in purple and red clusters that help to give the whole a gay appearance . The dwellings of the colonists are strewn along the fringes of the forest and from my post I could see several of them . Simple houses surrounded by barns and stalls and the fields all enclosed with hedges give the region a youthful appearance the like of which is rarely found in Europe . And plants here bloom more luxuriantly and more perfectly with a natural vigour that knows no exhaustion and fears no poverty, a vigour that has disappeared from our continent . </P>

Who became the superintendent of the remote british penal colony on norfolk island in 1840