In 1833, a man by the name of Frederick Hasted left his Midhurst home in Sussex for Adelaide, Upper Canada. In his former life, Hasted was well-known as a hawker, travelling with his small carriage drawn by dogs through Sussex, Hampshire and their adjacent counties selling books, newspapers and other printed matter. Agricultural Sussex had been hard hit by the recession of the 1830s. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, large numbers of military men were now without employment and the shift in supply and demand necessitated by a country now at peace, as well as technological advances, meant that agricultural labourers were being laid off. Frustrated with their situation, rural labourers rioted, ‘burning ricks and barns, destroying the threshing machines that were taking their winter work, and joining forces to demand higher wages and more job security’. Hasted had been indirectly affected by the Swing Riots and rural poverty. Tired of eking out a living and frustrated by the lack of economic opportunity, he took the passage out with his daughter to make a new life for himself as a labourer in Upper Canada. He initially settled in Adelaide, where there was a sizeable number of emigrants from Sussex. The presence of familiar faces provided him with a ready community in a foreign environment: he was well-known by the emigrants he travelled out with and he frequently bought land from and sold land to them and offered them work. However, Hasted was unwilling to relinquish his previous relationships altogether. Despite the fact that the cost of sending letters to England came ‘heavy’ to him, he was an avid letter writer to his friends back home. In the first nine months after he arrived, he wrote at least four letters to friends, telling them of the colony and outlining his hopes for the future. ‘[A]s I had forgot something of material consequence to you,’ he writes near the beginning of his fourth letter, to his friend ‘John’ in England, ‘I thought I would spend 2s. 2d. more for your sake.’ He writes to retract an offer of ‘some land for house and garden’ that he had made to John, but he envisages another important function for his letter.