A.-4

I. THE ISLANDS GENEBALLY.

AEEA, POPULATION, TEADE, ETC., OF THE PEINCIPAL GEOUPS. (BY ME. W. SEED, SECRETARY OP CUSTOMS.) Hon. Me. Vogel,— In obedience to your directions, conveyed to me in Mr. Fox's letter from Christchurch, dated the 20th ultimo, I have had a map of the Pacific Ocean made from tho Admiralty sheet charts. In order to save time, I had this done by the photo-lithographic process : it would have taken a long time to construct a chart of this size by hand. I have also collated all the information I could procure as to the area, population, and trade of the principal South Sea Island groups, and of the other tropical islands named in Mr. Fox's letter. This information is appended hereto. For facility of reference I have prefixed to, it a table showing the area, population, imports, and exports of the islands referred to, where statistics of this nature have been procurable ; as also a table showing the latitude and longitude within which the principal groups of islands in the Pacific are situated. I feel that the information here presented is most meagre and incomplete, but it is all I can procure at present, after most careful search in the library of the General Assembly, and in other directions where I thought it likely such information might exist. The general descriptions of the islands have been mainly taken from Findlay's South Pacific Directory; but some of them have been taken from Admiralty Hydrographic notices, from McCulloch's Commercial Dictionary, from Chambers's Encyclopaedia, from missionary notices and reports, and from various books of travel. The statistics have been gathered principally from tho Statesman's Tear Book for 1873, the American Tear Book for 1869, and from the reports from Her Majesty's Consuls, which are printed annually and laid before Parliament. With regard to the government of the various islands, so far as I can ascertain, all the groups that are situated north of the equator (with the exception of the Sandwich Islands, which have a settled form of constitutional government, the Marshall Islands, about which I can gather no information whatever, and the Kingsmill group, part north and part south of the line, and which has no form of government) are either claimed by or are in the possession of some civilized Power. The Philippines, Ladrones, Palaos or Pelew, and the Caroline Islands are all Spanish possessions. The Galapagos belong to the Eepublic of Ecuador. Of the islands in the South Pacific, the Society Islands, Paumotu or Low Archipelago, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia, and New Hebrides are in the possession of or are claimed by the French. The Tongan Islands are governed by a King, assisted by a Parliament of chiefs. Fiji can scarcely now be said to have a Government; whilst all the rest are a kind of "no-man's land," are without government, and are constantly torn by the debasing and savage wars of the petty chiefs inhabiting them. In relation to the question of annexing the Samoan or other group of islands to New Zealand, I find that a small group in the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles, occupies the position of a dependency of the Mauritius, from which it is distant over 900 miles; there is, therefore, a precedent for distant islands becoming " dependencies of a dependency." The revenue of the Seychelles is principally derived from Customs duties. Tfee duties on goods sent from Mauritius to Seychelles are carried to the credit of the revenue of the dependency. Through this arrangement, which appears only lately to have been made, the Civil Commissioner, in his report to the Governor of Mauritius, dated the 9th February, 1872, says: " The settlement of the much-vexed question as to whether the Seychelles I—A. 4.

I.—The Islands generally: Mr. Seed.