[294]. The names of the succeeding acting-adjutants at Woolwich will be found in the Appendix III.
[295]. Chesney’s ‘Expedition to the Euphrates,’ Pref. x.
[296]. Chesney’s ‘Observations on Fire-arms,’ p. 197.
[297]. On the completion of the service, the expedition was favoured with a few days' location at Damascus, where the party removed their beards and moustaches, and for the first time since the commencement of the enterprise, had the advantage of attending church for religious worship.
[298]. Pensioned in May, 1843, and appointed assistant lighthouse keeper at Europa Point, Gibraltar, under the Trinity Board of London.
[299]. Greenhill was an intelligent man, pleasantly eccentric, and fond of antiquities. While with the expedition he made a collection of silver coins of remote times, which, with laudable feelings of attachment to his native place, he presented to the Perth Museum. His hair was as white as silver, but his beard, full and flowing, was as black as ebony. To the Arabs he was quite a phenomenon, but the singularity which made him so, did not save him, on one occasion, from being rudely seized by a horde of banditti, and plundered, with almost fabulous dexterity, of the gilt buttons on his frock coat. They had nearly finished their work, when Greenhill tore himself from their grasp, but finding that a button still remained on the cuff, he audaciously pulled off the frock and threw it at them. Suspecting that their work was incomplete the Arabs pounced on the coat, and tearing off the remaining button scampered away to the hills again. When, some years later, the Niger expedition was forming, Greenhill volunteered to accompany it. He had a notion that the service would be one of suffering and vicissitude, and the better to inure himself to its contemplated hardships he submitted his body to rigorous experiments of exposure and self-denial, which, inducing erysipelas, caused his premature decease in October, 1840.
[300]. Pages 51 and 57, notes, 1st part, 2nd edit. It may be tolerated to mention the instances in which Lanyon figured, to deserve the record. In October, 1828, he finished a parallel in very easy soil of 262 cubic feet in 2 hours and 41 minutes, whilst an able-bodied sapper, unskilful at the pickaxe and the shovel, only completed the same content of excavation in 8 hours and 4 minutes! Thirty men were employed at the same time at similar tasks, the result of whose labours showed that for each man, strong and trained, it required to execute the work an average period of 4 hours and 54 minutes. The other instance refers to his completing the first task of a parallel, nearly 109 cubic feet, in easy soil in 16 minutes. In the Peninsula sieges, no more than 42 cubic feet of excavation appears to have been excavated by each individual of the military working parties as his first night’s work; but at the rate which rendered Lanyon celebrated, an active workman in these sieges ought to have finished his first night’s task in seven minutes! The comparison makes the difference so excessive, that credulity has scarcely sufficient tension to accredit it; but coming from an authority so proverbial for his accuracy, there is no alternative but to wonder at the achievements of the man who so signalized himself as a sapper; and to add, with the Colonel, the expression of mortification, “that the exertions of the British army should have fallen so miserably short of their brilliant exploits in the field.”
[301]. ‘United Service Journal,’ ii. 1837, p. 279.
[302]. Lanyon was afterwards promoted to be a colour-sergeant, and passed a few years in Canada during the revolt. On his return, his health, shattered by the exertions of his laborious life, caused him to leave the corps. Obtaining a situation as surveyor on the Trent and Mersey canal under Mr. Forbes, his former fellow labourer, he devoted himself to his new duties with his accustomed zeal: but in a few short months his powerful frame broke up, and he died at Lawton in Cheshire, in June, 1846. The integrity of his conduct and the utility of his services induced the directors of the company to honour his remains by the erection of a tomb to his memory. Here it would be proper to notice, he was one of those brave and humane miners who, in the ‘Cambria,’ bound for Vera Cruz, assisted to rescue the crew and passengers from the burning ‘Kent’ East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay, in February, 1825. The souls saved were 551, including 301 officers and men, 66 women, and 45 children of the 31st regiment.
[303]. ‘Grey’s Travels,’ 1841, i. p. 35.