His parents were Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Eliza Anne Frances Pattle, but his mother died within days of his birth.

This expedition was an advance party seeking a suitable site to found a colony in the Cook Strait area.

[3] Jerningham Wakefield had intended to stay in New Zealand for only a few months but he found the growth of the new colony so fascinating that it was four years before he returned to England in 1844.

In September 1845 he attended a lecture at the Royal Adelaide Gallery in London by the tattooed Pākehā Māori, Barnet Burns, who had previously applied without success to join the New Zealand Company on the Tory.

He was one of the MPs sometimes locked in small rooms at Parliament by Whips to keep them sober enough to vote in critical divisions, though in 1872 this was defeated when political opponents lowered a bottle of whisky down the chimney to him.