Virtual Museum Canada

Sir SandFord Fleming - The Knight Of Time

A wide area of action

The hard work of surveying

Intercolonial Railway survey group
lens(44 k)

Parties of surveyors and assistants travelled for several months, without any contact with civilization, to stake their assigned territory.

Camp during a surveying expedition
lens(71 k)

Surveying was hard work: journeys were long, men lived in tents or makeshift shelters in all weather, and any injury might prove fatal without medical assistance. Fleming’s reports included accounts of death by burning, neuralgia, and drowning in a frozen lake when the ice broke.

Extract from Fleming's journal
lens(60 k)

Fleming also had great difficulty in providing supplies for his men in remote and inaccessible regions.