Class 3rd.—Competent to register angles and distances, and to make a content plot.
Class 4th.—Able to compute areas, and horizontal and vertical distances and triangles.
Class 5th.—Able to lay out town lands or parishes for content with skill, so as to prevent confusion or unnecessary labour in the subsequent measurements.
Class 6th.—Fully acquainted with every branch of content surveying, and capable of directing parties of content surveyors.
Class A.—Competent to survey and plot roads, &c.
Class B—Competent to draw plans.
In all the classes, every man was expected to do his work accurately; and if, in addition, he showed rapidity with correctness and neatness, special encouragement was given to such sappers by the grant of a proportional allowance.
Second-corporal Robert Hearnden and two lance-corporals were attached on the 9th July to Colonel Mudge, R.E., and Mr. Featherstonhaugh, to assist in the topographical survey of the disputed territory in the state of Maine, with a view to the settlement of the boundary question. The sappers were dressed in plain clothes, suitable to the climate; and after a brief stay at New York, and subsequently at Boston, entered Fredericton on the 19th August. Sixty-two canoes were hired for the service of the commission, and about 100 men, chiefly Indians, to man them. Lance-corporal William McGregor was left at the observatory at the Grand Falls, St. John’s; and on every day, at intervals of two hours, registered the indications of the five different barometers placed in his charge. Corporal Hearnden and lance-corporal John McQueen were employed with the Commissioners; and, in tracing the sources of the rivers and finding the heights of land, aided in registering the results of the instruments used to determine their altitudes. This employment necessarily kept them much afloat; they moved daily to reconnoitre; and in doing so, the stores and equipage, for which they were responsible, were invariably sent onwards under their charge. At night they slept in tents by the shores of the streams where their day’s labour ended, and in winter were much exposed to great inclemency of weather and sometimes personal danger. Once corporal McQueen, under circumstances of peculiar peril, saved from drowning a servant of one of the commissioners, and held him with his powerful arm, by the collar, at the side of the canoe for about an hour, until he reached land. The canoe at the time was crossing the first lake on the Allagash, about three miles broad, and was freighted with baggage. Had he taken the sufferer into the canoe it would have foundered, as it was then sunk in the water to the gunwale. Corporal McQueen also met with personal misfortune in the loss by fire of his necessaries. Late in November the party reached Fredericton, and arrived at Woolwich on the 24th January, 1840. Each received 1s. a-day working pay, and as a reward for having performed their duties in a satisfactory manner, a gratuity of 10l.
Previously to undertaking the destruction of the wreck of the ‘Royal George,’ at Spithead, Colonel Pasley made various experiments with the diving-bell. The common form was rectangular, and proved under certain circumstances very dangerous. The diving-bell in Chatham dockyard was fitted up by carpenters of the corps, and when completed, resembled in its horizontal section, that of a boat twelve and a half feet long, and four and a half broad.[[358]] On the 14th May the altered bell was tried from the ‘Anson,’ 72, in the Medway, near Gillingham. Captain M. Williams, R.E., was the executive officer: he had with him a party of the corps and some riggers, &c., to work the bell. Sergeant-major Jones was the first man of the sappers to enter it, and on that day the experiments fully proved its efficacy for hazardous service. Colonel Pasley thereupon determined to use it at Spithead.[[359]]
In the experiments which from time to time were made with the voltaic battery, serjeant-major Jones was always appointed to assist. Colonel Pasley had a high opinion of his experience, and of the quickness with which he saw a difficulty and proposed a remedy. The operation of passing the priming wires through water into the bursting charges of powder, was brought to perfection by Captain Sandham, of the royal engineers. Hitherto tape had been wrapped all round the priming wires, and paid over the outside with waterproof composition, leaving the inside of the tapes, and the wires embraced by them, quite clean, “which formed two circular open joints, and therefore was rather a curious sort of connexion.” But the improved arrangement consisted in adopting the “expedient of smearing over or saturating with sergeant-major Jones' waterproof composition, the wires themselves, as well as every other part of the other materials used in this junction, whether tape, thread, hemp, twine, wooden plugs, and caps to prevent contact with the leaden pipe in which the priming apparatus was inclosed, or canvas tops applied over the wooden cap which served to cement it to the outside of the cylinder containing the great charge.” In the judicious use of that valuable composition, very extraordinary proofs of its excellence afterwards came to light in the operations at Spithead.[[360]]