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Campbell's Early Days.

Sir John Logan Campbell came of a family whose ancestral home was Kilbryde Castle, in Perthshire, a fortified home dating back four centuries. His forefathers, as was natural in that Highland stronghold, were mostly soldiers, a long line of them until it came to his father, who was an army surgeon and who had retired from the service to practice in Edinburgh. There John Logan was born in 1817. He studied for his father's profession, obtained his M.D., and became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He obtained a commission in the East India Company's Service, but abandoned that intention and instead decided to try his fortune in the far-south colonies. He sailed from Greenock in 1839 as surgeon of the ship “Palmyra,” bound for Sydney.

A very few months in New South Wales were enough for him. He did not like the convict associations of the Australian settlement, and New Zealand beckoned. He took passage in a vessel called the “Lady Lilford,” of 596 tons, which reached Wellington Harbour from Sydney in March, 1840, and after a few days there —it was not called Wellington then but “Britannia,” the rough little settlement on Petone beach—sailed for the Hauraki Gulf. In April he landed at Herekino Bay, in Waiau or Coromandel Harbour, and that was the beginning of his long career as a settler and citizen of the country that he came to love even more intensely than he did his native land. There on the shore of Waiau he took up his quarters with a trader who was the big man of the Hauraki in that primitive age, when the Waitemata Harbour was all but unknown and when Waiheke Island and Waiau were the chief resorts of the ships which every now and again came to load kauri spars for Australia, India or England.