land in the whole island. On the north coast of the frith is another missionary station, that of Mr. Painham. This person claims nearly the whole of the north coast, a tract of about thirty miles square, independently of the land around Manukau harbour on the west coast, a place which has been very much talked of in all books that have yet been written on the country. This celebrity has arisen from the fact of the extreme narrowness of the land at the head of Manukau; the frontage is certainly not half-a-mile; but I believe, from all the information I can collect, that Manukau is a very useless place, as it is full of sandbanks, and has a bar at its entrance, which almost precludes the possibility of entering, although the books say the contrary. I never met with one person in New Zealand who did not give it the character I have above described; should it not be the case, it will be a place of great consequence in time. It is perhaps the narrowest isthmus in the world, or at all events the narrowest joining two such large tracts of land. The length of coast to the north is not enough to prevent a vessel from sailing round, in preference to coming through a canal at Manukau, should there ever be one; for the sailor I think might generally calculate upon a greater loss of time in going through the canal than sailing round the land. Although the tract of land claimed by Mr. Painham is in all probability the largest, being about a million of acres, yet several missionaries claim tracts of from one hundred thousand to six hundred thousand acres in different parts of the country. It would be ridiculous for any government to recognise such claims, which would prevent the sale of government lands while any of these tracts remained unsold, as it would be for the interests of the holders to sell for less than the government price. The colony would be in fact swamped, just in the same manner as was Swan River by Mr. Peel's grant. I imagine almost all the land to the northward of the Thames is claimed by Europeans; many tracts have five or six claimants; and I know of people in
