A Chiel's Amang Us.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5880, 19 March 1887, Page 3

A Chiel's Amang Us.

ONE WHO KNEW INFANr NEW ZEALAND. Mr Fridham and his secretary, of whom bo much has been said by our Otago contemporaries, arrived here on Tuesday evening last and took up their abode at Coker's Hotel. Mr Pridham will be glad to see there not only hid Oxford contemporaries, but any surviving member of the New Zealand Company, or of the later Godley organisation. Although this is his first visit to New Zealand, Mr Pridham was connected more or less with the development of these islands from the establishment of the New Zealand Company to the death of Mr W. S. Moorhoase, formerly a fellow- student at the Middle Temple. It was Mr Pridham who lifted up his voice against the cession of AkaToa to France, which a weak-kneed Colonial Secretary at one time contemplated ; and it was he who prevailed upon the present Earl Grey (then Lord Howick) to cancel the sale of the Chatham Islands to a Hamburgh Colonisation Company, which had already been effected by the New Zealand Company. Having retired from the Bar in Victoria, Ifr Pridham is now here for the pnxpose of taking notes — historical, political, and statistical — of our past and present oondition. Incidentally he will also treat of our flora and fauna, our geology and mineralogy, &c, in which departments valuable assistance is promised by Dunedin expertß. Hie visit should be acceptable to journalists generally, inasmuch as he contributed to Simmond's Colonial Magazine and the Australasian and New Zealand Gazette 60 early as 1845, and was appointed to the post of Times' special correspondent in 1848, only vacating it at the close of hostilities in 1851. Of Mr Pridham's adventures throughout Europe a record remains in his " Koesuth and Magyar Land," which was published in 1852. Mr Pridham's more elaborate work, "England's Colonial Empire," three volumes of which have already appeared, he now seeks to continue.