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on board as he would be, in the same time, ashore; while I think we may say that three persons in four-men, women, and children, robust or delicate-generally leave the ship much improved in health and vigour. Doctors are not carried in New Zealand passenger ships because of any liability to diseasebut because births and accidents may happen-and because the mere presence of a good medical man on board, imparts a natural feeling of satisfaction and security. From the high character of New Zealand emigration, the smaller size and less crowded state of the ships, and the better quality of the dietary, the sea mortality from the Company's time down to the present day, has been singularly slight; while even in the more crowded Australian vessels, the following extract from the "Government Emigration Report" shows that the general mortality there has been only about one per cent.

"The mortality during the year, in seventy-two ships, has been slight, amounting to 37 per cent. on the adults, 3.31 on the children, and 1.01 on the whole number embarked."

In a company's vessel in which I made my first Voyage with about a hundred fellow-passengers, our excellent doctor had' a complete sinecure, and tortured only the flute; while in the Joseph Fletcher," in which I made my last voyage, with about the same number on board, I do not remember that the surgeon had to give any passenger even a pill.

FIRST WEEK'S "SETTLING-Down."-Though, however, the emigrant's first few days of sea-sickness are nothing to be alarmed at, his first week at sea is truly his "black time;" for more little miseries and discomforts are frequently crowded into the first week at sea, than are spread over the whole remainder of the voyage. Hence it is said, and not without reason, that as this "first week" must come whether the voyage be one of twenty days, fifty days, or a hundred days, a voyage to Australia or South Britain virtually entails little more discomfort than a voyage to America. In this "first week" he has, perchance, just parted with the friends of his childhood-old familiar faces are no longer around him-the shores of the old Land are still in sight-the ship and all on board are strangestrange faces, strange sounds, strange sights are everywhere-he

he neither cares to eat nor

-a few

knows no one, no one knows him drink-dull, desolate, miserable, sick, he tries to walk, and tumbles down; or steals to bed to bemoan his lot with many a groan and growl. But "durate et vosmet rebus servate secundis days, presto, and the scene shifts-we eat like lions, sleep like sloths--we have found our sea legs and can march erect--we have introduced ourselves to the dog, fed the poultry, visited the cook, explored the forecastle, hailed a sailor, cut jokes with the skipper, exchanged good offices with our emigrant comrades, and have become a merry little community bound together, for the time, by identity of interests and new pursuits, and well disposed to make the best of the long sea holiday before us.

OCCUPATIONS AND AMUSEMENTS.-One of the best inventions of these days would be an invention providing some useful employment for emigrants at sea. Babies, crochet, knitting, embroidery, tart-making, and love-making, pretty well employ the ladies of the ship; but in all sea industrial pursuits their lords cut but a sorry figure. It seems as if some malignant cannibal deity, cooping them up for the spit, had forbidden them to do aught but eat, drink, sleep, and grow fat. The only really useful occupation I ever saw any emigrant engaged in, was the one of making a fishing net-an example worthy of imitation. The stitch may be learned of any fisherman's daughter in ten minutes; needles, twine, lead, cork and cord, all stowed in a small bag; and two or three hours a-day devoted to the occupation would provide the emigrant with a seine, or drag-net, which he might either sell on arrival, or keep for his own use. Amateur carpentry and all similar handicraft occupations cannot be carried on at sea; and excepting shoemakers, tailors and a few others, whose tools and materials will pack in a small space, there are few or no mechanics who can continue their ordinary employments on board. Netting, seine making, is one of the few useful occupations which can be pursued on board: the work and materials may be tossed into a box or corner, and taken up again in a moment; and the manipulation may be carried on below, or on deck, either standing, sitting, or lying, in any weather and in almost any light. Emigrant swells of the 'poop west-end,' may take more

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kindly to the fisherman's needle when they learn that the industrous emigrant I allude to was a poop-cabin Nabob, the Hon. Henry Petre-who taught the art to my brother and myself.

:

Though, however, the emigrant's hands may be confined at sea to one or two useful pursuits, there is plenty of work for the head he may profitably devote a few hours a day to a course of useful reading, and thus master some popular work on agriculture and dairy farming,, on the sheep, ox and horse; or he may procure Williams' Maori grammar, so as to land with a useful smattering of the native language; or he may practise sketching in water-colours, so as, hereafter, to send mamma, or Rose Ada, a picture of the new home he has raised in Zealandia.

Mere amusements at sea are easily found; and in a well-conducted ship with a good captain and agreeable passengers, things "go merry as a marriage bell." In the first place, one has plenty of eating and drinking and smoking and chatting and lounging-then there is chess, whist, pistol and rifle practice, with many a merry game on deck by night and day-then song and dance in the lustrous tropical moonlights, with kit and sailor's hornpipe on the forecastle, cornopean and polka on the poop-then the sights and incidents of the ocean road: the crimson painted sunsets, the boarding homeward-bounders, catching shark, albatross and dolphin, harpooning the porpoise and the albacore, trapping the brilliant nautilus, rousing the great whale. And though hours may come to every man when he may wish that the long playday were over, and that he could brace up and get to work, yet few will step ashore in the new Land without casting one longing, lingering look behind at the stout ship which has borne them so gallantly across the waters and been for weeks their ocean-home.

THE LAND REGULATIONS.

801

CHAPTER XVI.

THE LAND-SALE REGULATIONS.

PARTAKING grievously of the character of experimental legislation, the New Zealand Land Regulations have very frequently been altered and amended, and have not yet acquired that character of stability with which it is so desirable that the laws of a country relating to real estate should be stamped. Last year, too, owing to the Home Government's disallowance of a certain Act of the General Assembly, almost all the existing Regulations were supposed to have been rendered so null and void that our New Zealand friends exclaimed for a while, and with reason, that, in the matter of their land-laws, Chaos had come again. If to the mention of these elements of confusion I add the fact that in the books, papers, lectures, pamphlets, prize essays, and the like which are ever pouring forth about this prolific country, scarcely any one set of the Regulations is described alike, I shall, I think, have said enough to show that the somewhat humorous complaint of its being far easier to pay for a hundred acres of land in New Zealand than to find out how, and of whom, and at what price, it is to be bought, has been a complaint not altogether without foundation. The Home Government, however, having since thought well to "allow" a second Land Act of the General Assembly, this injurious state of things no longer exists. This Act, which might almost be intituled the "Putting to Rights Act," virtually legalises all the present Provincial land-laws. The six sets of Regulations described hereafter are now, therefore, free from all blot or taint in regard to their validity; and though each Provincial Council (on obtaining the assent of the Governor and his Ministerial advisers) has the power of altering the current Regulations of its Province, and though further experience may

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THE LAND REGULATIONS.

lead to further amendments in some of their minor clauses, I believe that, except in the Otago set, no material changes are, as yet, contemplated in any of them, and that my readers may calculate that for the next six months at least, the various descriptions of waste-land in New Zealand will be open to them for sale and lease on the various "terms and conditions" set forth in the following pages.

Seeing that each of our other colonies manages to dispose of its public lands unde one code of Regulations, it appears to be a great anomaly that New Zealand should profess to require no fewer than six.* But it is asserted that there are certain exceptional features, both in the physical configuration of New Zealand and in the manner of her colonization, which show that in electing to have a special system of land-selling for each of the six parts of the colony, instead of one uniform system for the whole of it, the colonists only did that which it was natural they should do. New Zealand, it is argued-a country as large as Great Britain and Ireland-consists of two great islands. At different periods, six independent little settlements were planted on its coasts at a distance from each other of some 200 miles. Each of these (Auckland, Taranaki, Wellington, Nelson, Canterbury, Otago) was founded by a different body of Pioneers, professing a different object; each settlement, in many respects, was an independent little colony; and as the sale of its wild domains formed one great source of its public revenue, and constituted the chief means whereby its special colonising views could be carried out, 'tis not to be wondered at, when the new Constitution came into effect, that each little community should strive to retain the management of its waste-lands, and to preserve the privilege of adopting any particular code of Land Regulations which it might regard as being the most suitable to the natural features of its locality, and the best adapted to promote the further colonisation of its territory.

Whether, however, it would now be better policy to continue

*Hawke's Bay, formerly a portion of the Wellington country, has been erected into a seventh Province; but at present its Land Regulations are substantially the same as those of Wellington. Marlborough, formerly a portion of Nelson, also erected into a separate province, has at present been content to adopt the very faulty regulations of Nelson.