A.—3b,

PART III.

MEMORANDA BY MR. STERNDALE ON SOME OF THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS.

Mr. Steendale to the Hon. J. Vogel. Sib,— Auckland, 28th March, 1874. In obedience to your request, I have the honor to forward to you certain memoranda concerning the resources of tho greater number of those Islands of the Pacific upon which I have at any time resided or with which 1 have been engaged in trade. The lands to which these papers relate are those only which are inhabited by the copper-coloured Polynesians or Maoris, as they all call themselves, —that is to say, tribes from the same original stock as the aborigines of New Zealand, and speaking dialects of the same language. Concerning the Melanesian Isles, or those inhabited by the Papuan race, which include New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Isles, and New Guinea, I have no information to offer, never having been to them, or having had anything to do with their people. This much, however, is well understood —that they are very rich in a variety of valuable products ; and to obtain information concerning them, the most ready means with which I am acquainted would be to make inquiry among the labour-traders frequenting the port of Levuka, iv Eiji, many of those men b. ing of long experience in those localities, and sufficiently intelligent to relate truthfully what they have seen. Concerning the Fijis I offer no remarks, as they are now so generally well known from the elaborate reports of Her Majesty's Commissioners, and from various other sources. I have also avoided mentioning the Sandwich Islands, since, being under an enlightened Government of their own, aud on tho track of the mail steamers, information concerning them is very extensively diffused. For similar reasons, I have omitted the islands of the Society group, they being a dependency of France; and as concerns those of them which prefer independence, as well as the Paumutos or Low Archipelago, I have thought it unnecessary to repeat what I have already published in the Daily Southern Cross. In conclusion, I may remark that whatsoever I have recorded with respect to the condition of the islanders and the commercial resources of their lands, has been gathered in every instance from personal experience. Such facts as I may have incidentally mentioned, but have not myself seen, I have derived from the most reliable testimony. I might have made this report much more voluminous, but the shortness of the time permitted me for its preparation prevented the possibility of my doing so. Trusting that these memoranda may be found useful, as well as not void of a certain degree of interest, seeing that so much of them relates to localities concerning which very little circumstantial information has as yet been circulated in civilized States, I have, &c, The Hon. Julius A'ogel, &c, &c. H. B. Steendale. ♦- In dealing with the question of the trade of the Port of Auckland with the Islands of the Pacific, it is not necessary that I should enter into any description of the resources or prospects of the Fijis, for the reason that ample information with respect to them has been very generally diffused throughout the Australasian Colonies and Great Britain. Next to the Fijis, with which Auckland more than any other city of the Southern hemisphere ought to be regarded as geographically en rapport, the most profitable field of commercial adventure is obviously tho great Archipelago of Tonga, or the " Friendly Isles," as they were denominated by Cook, though some now say unjustly, as there is a story extant, upon the authority of Mariner, that the chiefs of Tonga did intend to have treacherously attacked and massacred his company, but allowed the favourable opportunity torso doing to escape them, in consequence of disagreements among themselves as to the programme of operations. However true or otherwise that may be —and in any case it is not to be wondered at on the part of a barbarous and (as the Tongese notoriously were) piratical people, upon almost their first introduction to strangers possessing so many and to them so surprising articles of utility, tho exhibition of which could not fail to operate upon their darkened minds as au extreme temptation to possess by whatsoever means—all I—A. 3b.