Chapter XXIX: Appendix: B

THE ROYAL ARTILLERY AND THE MAGNETIC SURVEY OF THE GLOBE.

After the peace of 1815 officers of Royal Artillery had little opportunity for active employment or staff duty. Among other officers who turned their attention to employments out of the ordinary routine were General Sir Edward Sabine and the late Colonel Colquhoun. The latter officer made a voyage to the Arctic Seas as an amateur whaler, took employment in connection with a South American Mining Company, and, before his appointment to the Carriage Department, in which he did most excellent service for many years--till nearly the date of the Crimean war--commanded the Artillery of Sir de Lacy Evans’s Spanish Legion, and was employed with the naval expeditions sent to Spain and to the coast of Syria.

Sir Edward Sabine began a long scientific career by accompanying the late Sir Edward Parry to the North Polar Seas in 1819-20, as the scientific observer of his expedition. His interest in scientific pursuits, and especially in the determination of the figure of the Earth and in the science of terrestrial magnetism, has continued to the present date. He filled the office of Secretary of the Royal Society from 1828 to 1829, that of Foreign Secretary from 1845 to 1850, and that of Treasurer from 1850 to 1861; and he was President from 1861 to 1871, when he retired from office. In 1839, the Royal Society and British Association procured the sanction of the Government for a naval expedition to the Antarctic Seas, and for the establishment of four fixed magnetic and meteorological observatories at four stations widely apart, namely, Hobarton, in Van Diemen’s Land, Cape Town, St. Helena, and Toronto. The station at Hobarton was undertaken by the Admiralty, and given to officers of the late Sir James Ross’s Antarctic expedition. The establishment of the other observatories was, under the authority of the Master-General and Board of Ordnance, entrusted to Royal Artillery officers, with non-commissioned officers as assistants, who were employed under the orders of the Deputy Adjutant-General and of Sir Edward (then Major) Sabine, as an ordinary staff duty. The officers successively employed were Lieutenants (now Major-Generals) F. Eardley-Wilmot, W. J. Smythe, J. H. Lefroy, C. J. B. Riddell, and H. Clerk; Lieutenant (now Colonel) Younghusband and the late Colonel H. J. Strange.

The magnetic instruments employed, of singular elegance and precision, were designed by the Rev. Humphrey Lloyd (now Provost) of Trinity College, Dublin, by whom the officers were instructed in their manipulation at the Magnetic Observatory in the College grounds, the only one then existing in the United Kingdom. The discovery which had been made of the simultaneous manifestation of magnetical disturbance over a wide extent of the globe rendered it desirable that the observations at all the stations should be taken at the same moment of absolute time; and, in compliment to Professor Gauss, to whom magnetic science was so deeply indebted, Goettingen time was universally adopted. Observations of the three elements--Declination, Horizontal Force, and Vertical Force--were made every two hours, day and night, and with such strictness that, if by any accident the right moment was lost, the observation was entered in red ink, with a note of the number of seconds elapsed. Once a month, on what was called “Term Day,” the observations were prosecuted at intervals of a few minutes for twenty-four hours uninterruptedly, and a similar course was adopted whenever a magnetic storm declared itself, and persevered in until the storm passed away, a period, occasionally, of as much as thirty hours.

The observatories were established originally for three years, but were continued, in the case of the Cape and St. Helena, for a second term of the same length, and in that of Toronto for three terms. At the conclusion of these terms the St. Helena observatory was discontinued, and the remaining observatories were taken over by the local governments.

Lieutenant Clerk commenced his magnetic employment by a cruise in the Antarctic Seas for a magnetic survey. Lieutenant Lefroy carried out a magnetic survey of a considerable portion of the Hudson’s Bay territories, and Lieutenant Eardley-Wilmot a survey of the Cape Colony.

The observations made at the Ordnance and Naval Observatories have been published under the direction of Sir Edward Sabine, who has had an office for the purpose at [Sidenote: In November, 1871.] Woolwich, which has been subsequently removed to the Kew Observatory.

The brief summary given above of the operations which earned for so many Artillery officers the blue riband of Science,--Fellowship of the Royal Society,--would establish to a great extent that which its most distinguished officers have always sought to secure for the Regiment,--a scientific reputation. But in the career of Sir Edward Sabine, so briefly alluded to, there has been one continued proof of the possibility of a soldier attaining the highest eminence in the world of science. Although personally unknown to many of his brother officers, his fame has been the pride of all; and has been felt to reflect a lustre, unprecedented in the profession, upon the Corps of which he is a member. Many readers of these pages will remember the reception given to him when, with the other Colonels-Commandant, he was persuaded during the present year to revisit the head-quarters of the Regiment. In the enthusiasm with which he was greeted by old and young, there was an unmistakable evidence of an _esprit de corps_, which, while admitting the claims of the scientific world at large upon their distinguished comrade, yet determined that it should be known to him that his honours were doubly dear to them because he was one of themselves.

In the sketch of the Magnetic Survey of the Globe given above, there would be a great omission if it were not stated how much the employment of Artillery officers in these operations was due to the previous labours and successes of Sir Edward Sabine. It was in 1817, two years after the conclusion of the war, that the first Polar Expedition was prepared. The Admiralty, to whom the preparations were entrusted, applied to the President and Council of the Royal Society to recommend a person who should be competent to conduct the researches in Physics and Natural History. General Mudge--already mentioned in this work--was then at the head of the British Trigonometrical Survey, and was a member of the Council of the Royal Society. It may be here mentioned, in passing, that in those days the Artillery and Engineers had the alternate direction of the Trigonometrical Survey, now apparently vested exclusively in the latter. Sir Edward Sabine was already favourably known, not merely to General Mudge, but also to other leading members of the Council of the Royal Society, such as Young, Kater, Wollaston, and Davy,--on account of some works which he had written, one being on the Birds of North America, in which country he had served during the war of 1812-14. After passing a severe examination, with great credit, Sir Edward Sabine’s appointment to the Polar Expedition was sanctioned by Lord Mulgrave, then Master-General of the Ordnance: and early in 1818 he sailed in the ‘Isabella,’ making his first Pendulum station at Hare Island, in Baffin’s Bay, in the spring of 1818. The results of his experiments, then and subsequently, appeared in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ and in a work entitled ‘Pendulum and other Experiments,’ published in 1825, at the cost of Government, on the recommendation of the Duke of Wellington, who had succeeded Lord Mulgrave as Master-General of the Ordnance.

It was Sir Edward’s hope--in which, however, he was disappointed--that a series of Pendulum experiments on the continental surface comprised between the high Canadian latitudes and the shores of the Mexican Sea, should also be undertaken. He has lived, however, to see the same object admirably accomplished on the continent of British India between Cape Comorin and the Higher Himalaya, under the able direction of Colonel Walker of the Royal (Indian) Engineers,--and to take himself a final part in the completion of the series, at the Kew Physical Observatory, by Captain Heaviside, R.E., and the men of the Indian Engineers, employed on that service by Colonel Walker. It may be said without exaggeration that the support given by Sir Edward--as President of the Royal Society--to Colonel Walker’s propositions, and the earlier experiments made by himself in the same field, have been among the highest services rendered by any man to science. Among the many Artillery officers who, since the peace of 1815, have sought to make a return to their country by their devotion to physical science, Sir Edward Sabine stands _facile princeps_:--and he has had the satisfaction of living to see, not merely his experiments carried to maturity, but also the inferences, which he did not hesitate to draw with confidence from his own earlier experiments, confirmed by the results of the labours of others. The results of his experiments, which claimed to be sufficiently extensive to justify the conclusion which they [Sidenote: Transactions of Royal Astronomical Society.] were held to establish of the measure of the ellipticity in the northern portion of the globe, have received an increased value since the published results of a similar series in the southern hemisphere by Captain Henry Foster, from the fact of their mutual agreement.

These earlier services of Sir Edward Sabine supplied the ground on which the then Master-General (Lord Vivian) justified,--and on which Sir Robert Peel, as head of the Government, approved,--his nomination to the superintendence of the Magnetic Observatories in 1839, fourteen years after the publication by him of the work mentioned above, ‘Pendulum and other Experiments.’ It was while he held this appointment, that he directed the Magnetic Survey of the Globe, in which so many Artillery officers had the good fortune to take a leading part.