Although sealers had begun commercial operations on Van Diemen's Land in late 1798, the first significant European presence on the island came five years later, with the establishment in September 1803 of a small military outpost at Risdon on the Derwent River near present-day Hobart.[16][17] Several bloody encounters with local Aboriginal clans took place over the next five months, with shots fired and an Aboriginal boy seized. David Collins arrived as the colony's first lieutenant governor in February 1804 with instructions from London that any acts of violence against the Aboriginal people by Europeans were to be punished, but failed to publish those instructions, leaving no legal framework on how to deal with any violent conflict.[18]