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1875. NEW ZEALAND.

REPORT BY INSPECTOR OF SURVEYS.

Presented to both Souses of the General Assembly by Command of Sis Excellency.

Mr. T. Heale to the Hon. the Native Minister. Sir, — Inspector of Surveys' Office, Auckland, 28th May, 1875. The work of my department during the past year has had relation chiefly to the numerous and extensive surveys of lands purchased by the Government from Natives, and to surveys of Native land claims, the duty of executing which was imposed upon me by "The Native Lands Act, 1873." The extension of triangulation over new country has necessarily had to a great extent to be subordinated to these urgent duties. My chief assistant, Mr. Smith, has been occupied during the whole summer and autumn in filling up interstices and breaking down large triangles, in the former trigonometrical survey of the mountainous and heavily-wooded district north of Auckland, and in supervising, checking, and closing with the triangulation the surveys made by numerous private surveyors, whom it was found necessary to employ, in some cases by reason of the great number of surveys required at once, and in several instances owing to arrangements entered into by land purchase agents independently of this department. Several surveys in the most difficult and most inaccessible parts of the country were at the same time made by the junior officers of the department. The results of all this work, as set out in the return annexed, show very strikingly the relative economy of surveys under official direction as compared with those executed as formerly by licensed surveyors employed by the Native claimants, the advantage in accuracy and completeness being at the least equally remarkable. For the same purpose of forwarding the large block surveys made by officers of this department for land claims, a considerable number of triangles have been fixed and observed in the Seventy-Mile Bush, in the Province of Wellington, connecting on one side with the Hawke's Bay triangulation, and on the other with that of Mr. Jackson, of the Province of Wellington. Early in the year I hoped to have been able to extend the triangulation of Hawke's Bay in regular course to the north and east, to embrace Poverty Bay; but the number of surveys which were undertaken on the East Coast by private surveyors, under the auspices of land purchase agents, became so great, and from the want of any official control or check by triangulation the risk of gross error became so alarming, that I was obliged to break through the regular plan of the work, and to despatch my second assistant, Mr. Baker, to look after them, as Mr. Smith had done those in the North, and for this purpose, while exercisiug supervision over the private surveyors around, to commence a triangulation from an excellent independent base near Gisborne. This work will extend over upwards of a million acres of land, and will ultimately, I hope, next year be closed with the Bay of Plenty triangulation near Opotiki, and with that of Hawke's Bay at the Wairoa, and so will furnish an excellent means of verification for both, and a positive test of the magnitude of the error of discrepancy to which the work is subject, an error which, in the various closures hitherto made, has never amounted to anything near the limit of one foot in a mile, which I consider theoretically possible and admissible in work of this nature. A large amount of block surveying for the General Government has also been carried on for some time past inland from the north shore of Cook Strait. This was formerly placed under an occasional supervision by Mr. Marchant, then acting as draftsman in the Crown Lands Office at Wellington. A great extension of this work towards Taupo having this year been required, Mr. Marchant has been made an officer of my department, and the system as recommended and pursued by me has been most energetically and ably initiated by him over that great area of country, and I look with confidence to his bringing up the triangulation from the coast, where it is based on the sides determined by Mr. Jackson, to Taupo, to close with mine at Kaimanawa and on the Upper Waikato. I—II. G. •