In June, one sergeant and thirty-nine rank and file under Captain John Harper, R.E., were detached from Woolwich to Feversham, and after destroying the powder-mills and premises connected with them, returned to head-quarters in September. The first company of the corps, which had been at Gibraltar since 1772 and was present at the celebrated siege a few years afterwards, was removed, in the course of relief, from that fortress to Woolwich in June. Breast or belt-plates of brass, in place of buckles, were adopted early in the year by permission of General Gother Mann. All ranks wore a plate of uniform device and dimensions, and each soldier paid for his own. The device consisted of the royal cipher, encircled by the garter, bearing the name of the corps and surmounted by a crown. A fluctuating detachment, not exceeding thirteen masons and miners under a corporal, was detached in the autumn from Devonport to St. Nicholas Island, and remained there for nearly four months repairing the fortifications. At the fall of the year the engineer commission to the West Indies, composed of Colonel Sir James Carmichael Smyth, Major Fanshawe, and Captain Oldfield inspected, in the course of their professional tour, the fourth company of sappers stationed at Barbadoes under the command of Captain Loyalty Peake. Its state was most creditable. Since its arrival in the command it had only lost one man and that from an accident. Whilst other troops quartered under the same roof were withered and sickly, the sappers were healthy—a fact that was ascribed to the attention of the officers, and the absence among the men of those intemperate habits, which in a hot and enervating climate, originate so many ailments. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: Royal Sappers & Miners Plate XII. UNIFORM 1823. Printed by M & N Hanhart. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The small detachment at the Cape of Good Hope was much dispersed at this period. The men detached are traced at short intervals at Cape Town, Kaffir Drift, Wiltshire, Port Elizabeth, and New Post Kat River.