In Parliament he had been made one of a committee to inspect prisons; and he had been keenly touched by the miserable plight of the many honest men who, through mere misfortune, were there languishing in hopeless imprisonment for debt. He bethought himself of the possibility of giving such men a new chance of life and the recovery of fortune in America; and the thought grew into a plan for a new colony. He knew how the southern coast lay vacant between Charleston and the Spaniards at St. Augustine. There were good lands there, no doubt; and his soldier’s eye showed him, by a mere glance at a map, how fine a point of vantage it might be made if fortified against the alien power in Florida. And so he made his plans. It should be a military colony, a colony of fortified posts; and honest men who had fallen upon poverty or misfortune at home should have a chance, if they would work, to profit by the undertaking, though he should take them from debtors’ prisons. Both King and Parliament listened very willingly to what he proposed. The King signed a charter, giving the undertaking into the hands of trustees, who were in effect to be proprietors (June, 1732); and Parliament voted ten thousand pounds as its subscription to the enterprise; while men of as liberal a spirit as Oglethorpe’s associated themselves with him to carry the humane plan out, giving money, counsel, and service without so much as an expectation of gain to themselves, or any material return for their outlay. Men had ceased by that time to dream that colonization would make those rich who fathered it and paid its first bills. By the end of October, 1732, the first shipload of settlers was off for America, Oglethorpe himself at their head; and by February, 1733, they were already busy building their first settlement on Yamacraw Bluff, within the broad stream of the Savannah.