Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/204

 for Lord Rawdon, afterwards Marquis of Hastings, and more than once succeeded in rallying the men of Carolina round the standard of the king's army. On his return to Ireland he was appointed coast officer at Annalong in county Down, to which he was attracted hy the possibilities of action offered by the smuggling proclivities of the district, and here his son Francis was born, 16 March 1789. At the early age of nine the child held a commission as sub-lieutenant in the Mourne infantry, a body of volunteers raised by Captain Chesney for the defence of the county against the United Irishmen, and the boy actually went out on service in the field. He had already been presented with a cadetship at Woolwich by his father's old patron Lord Rawdon (then Lord Moira), and in 1803, at the age of fourteen, passed into the preparatory academy at Great Marlow, and was gazetted to the royal artillery at Woolwich in 1805. In spite of this precocious boyhood, up to the age of forty Chesney was chiefly occupied with the uneventful routine duties of his regiment at Portsmouth, Guernsey, Leith, Dublin, and Gibraltar ; but his official duties were varied by visits to the continent, first after the battle of Water- loo, in which he had vainly endeavoured to take part, and again in 1827, when he made a professional tour of examination of Napoleon's battle-fields. He never saw active service, though always eager to volunteer in every expedition for fifty years, from the campaign ending in Waterloo in 1815 to the invasion of the Crimea in 1854-5. In 1829 he set out for Constantinople, in the hope of being able to render service to the Turks in the struggle in which they were then engaged with Russia, but arrived only in time to hear of the disastrous peace of Adrianople. He was then encouraged by Sir R. Goroon, British ambassador at the Porte, to make a tour of inspection in Egypt and Syria, and this led to two results of the highest importance. One was the Suez Canal, which Chesney proved to be a perfectly feasible undertaking from an engineer's point of view, in spite of the adverse conclusions of Napoleon's surveyors; and it was on the strength of Chesney's report that M. de Lesseps, by his own frank admission, was first led to attempt the great enterprise which he has since successfully carriea out. The second result was his exploration in 1831 of the Euphrates valley, which induced the home government to send out two subsequent expeditions with a view to opening out a route to India through Syria and the Persian Gulf. After having travelled up the Nile to the second cataract, crossed the desert from Kind to Koseyr, and surveyed the Isthmus of Suez, Chesney resolved to examine the possibilities of a new road to India, or rather of a very old but long neglected road, which, starting from the coast of Syria, should make use of the waters of the Great River, and coming out at the head of the Persian Gulf, should find a terminus at Kurrachee or Bombay. With the view of surveying the Euphrates, which had hitherto remained unexplored, he journeyed through Palestine, and then, striking the Euphrates at Anah, proceeded to take elaborate soundings and surveys of the river from that town to its embouchure in the Persian Gulf (1831). The task was one of exceeding difficulty, for Chesney was unacquainted with the language of the Arabs, at whose mercy his life was placed, and was compelled to use the utmost secrecy in obtaining the necessary information about the- depth and character of the river's course and currents. A great part of his observations were conducted from a raft, in the well of which he made a hole through which he could secretly work the sounding-pole. The hostility of the Arab tribes to one another and to the stranger who had intruded into their country was a constant source of danger, and Chesney frequently made his survey under a fire from the banks. He soon succeeded, however, in winning the confidence of the Arabs, and effected a thorough survey of the lower part of the Euphrates; when, after a tour through Persia to Tebriz and Trebizonde, and thence by an adventurous route across to Aleppo, failing to complete his exploration by a survey of the upper portion of the river in consequence of the disturbed state of the country, he returned to England to make his report to the government and urge by every means in his power the adoption of the Euphrates route to India. For two years he besieged the various authorities, secured the interest of King William, of Lord Stratford (then Sir Stratford Canning), Lord Ripon, and other people of influence, and at length succeeded in getting a select committee appointed, which decided that the scheme of steam communication with India by way of the Euphrates deserv^ed a careful trial. The India board was also favourable to the project, and the House of Commons voted 20,000l. for the expenses of a new expedition, of which Chesney was to be the commander. Early in 1835, with a company of thirteen officers and a small number of artillerymen, engineers, sappers, and miners, Chesney set sail for the bay of Antioch, in order to prove his own theory that the Euphrates was navigable from the point nearest to that bay down to its mouth. The operation was attended