impressed with the necessity of granting real self-government to the colonies, and he left behind him a letter expressing his views on the subject, addressed to Mr. Gladstone, which is worth perusal as evidencing his foresight of the future of the British Colonial Empire. He sailed for New Zealand with his wife and son (he had married in 1846) in the “Lady Nugent,” on December 12, 1849), and arrived at Port Cooper on April 12, 1850.
His first impressions of Lyttelton were expressed in a letter to his friend, Mr. Adderley, dated April 22. “On rounding the Bluff aforesaid again I was perfectly astounded at what I saw. One might have supposed that the country had been colonised for years, so settled and busy was the look of its port. In the first place there is what the Yankees would call a ‘splendid’ jetty, from thence a wide, beaten-looking road heads up the hill, and turns off through a deep cutting to the eastward. On each side of the road there are houses scattered, to the number of about twenty-five, including two ‘hotels,’ and a custom-house! (in the shape of a weather-boarded hut certainly, but still a custom-house). In a square railed off close to the jetty are four excellent houses, intended for emigrants’ barracks, with a cook-house in the centre. Next to the square comes a small house, which Thomas inhabits himself, and which is destined for an agent’s office; behind this, divided from it by a plot of ground intended for a warden, stands a stately edifice, which was introduced in due form to us as ‘our house.” ... The (Sumner) road is a tremendous piece of work on the harbour side, great part of it being carried through solid rock, which can only be removed by blasting... The line, to my unprofessional eye, seems very well engineered, being nowhere steeper than one in twenty.”
But Mr. Godley was bitterly disappointed to find that the £20,000 credit had been overspent by nearly £4,000, and accused Captain Thomas of extravagance in too
