Driven for men to send to the war, some of the stations by degrees were either wholly denuded of their forces or considerably reduced. The half company at Hong Kong was first removed, landing at Woolwich on the 3rd January. During its service in China its character was so uniformly exemplary that Sir John Burgoyne complimented the men in a general order. On embarking for England Captain Whittingham, the commanding royal engineer, made a flattering report of their conduct. “The proofs,” he wrote, “are patent in the few deaths, in the few cases of intermittent or other climatal diseases, and in the absolute cessation of courts-martial, although the ratio of exposure to a tropical sun—the engendering cause of disease and drunkenness—has been far greater than those of other troops and has almost exhausted the stamina of the men.” “Their extreme good conduct” was also the subject of a report from Lieutenant and Adjutant Lloyd, 59th regiment, who commanded the troops on board. A few years ago three privates superintended under the colonial clerk of works the erection of the Government offices. From December, 1852, three other men were employed under Mr. Cleverley, the surveyor-general, as overseers in building the Government-house; and on quitting the island, he testified to the very great benefit that had been derived from their supervision of the works. For more than eleven years a small force of the corps had served in China, the first party having landed in October, 1843. The total number which had been sent there amounted to 113, of whom 33 died, 27 were invalided, 1 was discharged in the colony and died, 7 deserted, 23 returned to England by reliefs, and 22 reached home on the final removal of the detachment from Hong Kong. The small party at Spike Island was withdrawn the same month. Four months later the Melbourne detachment returned to England; then followed the seventeenth company from the Cape in July; and gradually Gibraltar, Corfu, and Bermuda were left with only invalid nuclei unfitted for the stern vicissitudes of campaigning but able for the works of the stations. A detachment of unmarried men was also ordered from the remote settlement of the Swan River, but arrived too late to share in the glories of the siege. This shearing, however, furnished but a unit of accessible sappers—for it brought to this country a number of men who required to be physically renewed before sending them on a hard service, where the trials of weather alone were likely to break them up without subjecting them to the severities of the trenches. Two sapper divers landed at Balaklava from the ‘Robert Lowe,’ on the 4th January, under the command of Captain De Moleyns, having in charge Mr. Rendel’s loaded cylinders to be applied for blasting the sunken ships at the mouth of the harbour.[165]