(6.) The Area surveyed in each Case.

The extent of land which has hitherto been surveyed in all the claims, including a few cases still only estimated, is 474,146 acres. Some surveys have yet to come in, but they will not very materially add to these figures. The acreage surveyed in Old Land Claims is 376,719 acres; in Pre-emptive Claims, 97,427 acres. There is no doubt that the grant of liberal survey allowance had a very beneficial effect. If the Government had attempted to survey the claims themselves, the claimants would have had no interest in the whole exterior boundaries being got, and would only have felt called upon to point out as much as was actually granted to them. The residue would practically have reverted to the Natives, and must at some time or other have been purchased again by the Government; and a large extent of territory must have remained, as it was before the passing of the Land Claims Acts, a terra incognita. But when the claimants were told they would receive an allowance in acreage to the extent of 15 per cent. on the area, surveyed, it became their interest to exert all their influence with the Native sellers to give up the whole boundaries originally sold. The result has been, not only to produce a large surplus of land which, under the operation of the existing Acts, goes to the Crown, but to connect the claims together and lay them down on a map. Under the arrangements which I directed to be adopted by the surveyors engaged in the survey of the claims, I was enabled, as the original boundaries of a great number of the claims were conterminous, to compile a plan of the whole country about the Bay of Islands and Mangonui, showing the Government purchases there as well as the land claims; and a connected map now exists of all that part of the Province of Auckland which lies between the Waikato River and the North Cape.

One ground on which it was decided to grant so liberal an allowance for surveys probably was that the then Surveyor-General, in his evidence before the Land Claims Committee in 1856, had said he should require for a Government survey of the claims a staff of eighteen surveyors at a cost of £8,000 page 627a year. I think this was too high an estimate; but it is certain that, if the Government had attempted the survey itself, it would have cost more than £10,000. I had the Hokianga scrip claims surveyed, which cost on the average 1s per acre; and I think that rate may be taken as a fair estimate of the value of the surveys executed by the claimants themselves. Assuming this estimate, it follows that the claimants should be credited with a sum of about £23,000, as the cost of surveying the 474,146 acres above mentioned, to be added to the sums paid to the Natives and the Government; and thus a total is reached of about £131,000 under all these heads of expenditure together.

It will be convenient, before proceeding to the details of the disposal of the claims, to see what relation these sums bear to each other. The total amount of money or money's worth which their purchases cost the claimants was, in round numbers, £131,000; the total area their claims were found to contain was 474,000 acres. Looking therefore at the transaction in the gross, it may be said that the land cost the claimants at the rate of 5s. 6d. per acre up to the point when the Government should either make them grants or purchase their interest. I have often heard it said that it would have been far better for the claimants to have thrown up all their land at once, and bought what they wanted from the Crown; and I think the facts I have just mentioned go far to justify that saying.