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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 45, 7 March 1884, Page 27

Bankrupt Purchase of Drapery. Carter and Co., Heady-Money Drapers, 60 and 62 George street, have bought over 70 cases new goods consigned to the Bankrupt Estate of Carter and Peploe, and will offer the lot at English cost. Please see and judge for yourself, 60 and 62 George s'reet.— Advt. The Pall Mall Gazette says :— Mr. George Palmer, M.P., has received a letter from the Hey. W. G. Lawes, formerly of Reading, and now a missionary in New Guinea, bringing to his notice, as hon. treasurer of the Aborigines' Protection Society, the fact of an alleged purchase by certain adventurers of large tracts of land in New Guinea for sugar production. Mr. Lawes points out that these speculators profess to have purchased, at the price of one penny per acie, 15,000 acres of land, valued by a scientific agriculturist afc £2 an acre, though the true owner of the land they had never seen. They had, at the time of writing, gone along the coast to make other purchases in the same way, and when they had obtained some thousands more acres of the best land in New Guinea, they would probably ask the British Government to iatify their title and secure to them the lands which had been hunting grounds and garden plots of the natives for miny generations. Such a ratification would inevitabJy.'produce collision with the natives and conflict with British interests. Upon the receipt of Mr. Lawes'a letter, Mr. Palmer promptly brought the subject before the Colonial Office, and the hon. gentleman has received a communication from that office, in which Sir Robert G. W. Herbert says be has been directed by the Earl of Derby to inform Mr. Palmer that " assuming the facts to fee as stated (and the various accounts are in substantial accord), her Majesty's Government will certainly refuse to recognise this transaction or any others of a similar char.« acter,"