Fitzgerald and the Canterbury Settlement.

While holding that post, and engaging in scientific and literary research, he became acquainted with several leading spirits in the new science of colonisation. He met Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Lord Lyttelton, John Robert Godley, and other enthusiasts in the cause of extending page 26 British settlement overseas, and when the Canterbury colony was planned, he threw himself with zeal and energy into the fascinating project. He gave up his quiet secure post and became emigration agent in London for the new settlement, and when all was ready he took passage with his young wife in the first of the ships, the “Charlotte Jane.” He was thirty-one years old, a gallant adventurous spirit, a capital leader of all those activities on board ship which went to make the long, tedious voyage endurable.