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Extract from the Report of the Committee to the Annual Meeting, April 30th, 1822, at Freemasons’ Hall, Great Queen Street.

Australasia Mission.

The seminary at Parramatta, for New Zealanders, has been for the present suspended, the change of habits and climate being found injurious to the health of the natives, and to require a degree of attention to them which under present circumstances could not be paid. Mr. Samuel Butler left in the beginning of March, and returned in the Hope to New Zealand. The Committee feel, however, that such advantages have been already derived from the seminary, and are likely still to be derived when it can be placed under due management, that they wish every effort to be made to place it on a permanent footing.…

Mr. Marsden’s third visit to New Zealand…has been detailed in a copious journal, abounding, like his former journal, in the most interesting details respecting this extraordinary people.…This visit occupied about nine months, from the end of February to the beginning of December, 1820.…In March and April he first walked from the Bay of Islands to the Gambier, on the west coast of the island; and afterward he accompanied Captain Skinner, in the Dromedary, by the North Cape, to the same place. In May he visited various districts south-westward of Kiddeekiddee. The Coromandel having arrived in the Bay for timber, Mr. Marsden proceeded in her to the Thames, and spent the months of June, July, and August in visiting the inhabitants in the bays and creeks of that river, those of Mercury Bay, on the ocean, south of Cape Colville, and those on the western coast of the island, south-east of the Gambier. Returning to the Bay of Islands, he embarked for Port Jackson in a Government schooner on the 17th of September, but the schooner, putting back, on account of bad weather and being very deeply laden, Mr. Marsden determined to wait for the return of the Dromedary to Port Jackson. Finding that she would not sail for some weeks he improved the interval in revisiting the people in the Thames and on the western coast of the island. Returning by the way of the Gambier, he crossed the country to Whangarooa, and embarked there on board the Dromedary on the 25th of November.