Thus the appeal that Georgia made to foreign Protestants was quite in keeping with the Bray tradition. Even more significant was Bray's contact with the colonial scheme of his parishioner and close friend, Thomas Coram. Coram, who is chiefly famous as the founder of the great London Foundling Hospital, was a former mariner and ship-builder at Taunton, Massachusetts. At this time, however, he was a London merchant engaged in colonial commerce and in promoting a project for planting 'the lands lying wast and derelict between New England and Nova Scotia.'23 [Note 23 H. F. B. Compston, Thomas Coram, London, 1918, is a brief biography, inadequate in its treatment of Coram's colonial interests. These I expect to discuss in an article based upon a mass of memorials, etc., in the P.R.D., which were composed by Coram, between 1713 and 1743, in his role of promoter of a succession of schemes to colonize lands on the Maine border, in Nova Scotia, and Cat Island (Bahamas). At different times he proposed as settlers retired officers and soldiers, French Protestants, convicts, Irish, Palatines, unemployed artisans, and the 'graduates' of his Foundling Hospital. Coram bitterly contested the eastern claims of Massachusetts and of the other pretenders to the Sagadahoc region. His ideas of colonial government were strikingly liberal, within the limits of effective mercantilism. After his break with his fellow Trustees he sought to develop Nova Scotia as a rival to Georgia, purged of the latter's military and paternalistic features.] Contemporary records of Coram's conversations with his rector are lacking, but in 1734 he wrote a striking account of them in a letter to Benjamin Colman of Boston. 24 [Note 24 W. C. Ford (ed.), 'Letters of Thomas Coram,' Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings]