PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE a- 



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it would be indecovous for me to state my humble opiiiiou of what it ..u-m u. be 

 The circumstances which lead you to mention it, are suthcientlv known to yourself 

 as Surveyor General, and I shall be content with such additional pay as the 

 Lieutenant Governor in Council shall deem expedient to establish." The scale 

 was made 10s currency per day for surveyors, 3s 9d for chainmen and 2s 6d for 

 axemen, with the usual allowance for rations. In 1818 a neM- scheme was intro- 

 duced. Surveys of townships were let under contract, and payment was made in 

 a percentage of the lands. The common allowance was A), per cent., but if the 

 land of a township was shown to be marshy or the quality of it i)oor, the percentage 

 might be draAvn from lands elsewhere. 



Economy was enjoined upon all surveyors, and the records show that it was 

 rigidly exacted. '-You will pay the strictest attention to the economy of your 

 time.'' Surveyor General Smith advised Abraham Iredell in 1803, "as the most 

 minute scrutiny will be made in respect of the same." There Avas an audit of tlie 

 accounts in Toronto, and afterwards an audit in London before they were finally 

 passed, and for this reason all accounts and vouchers were required to be made out 

 in quadruplicate. 



It will easily be understood that on the allowances for Avages and rations a 

 surveyor could not be generous. In most cases he went into the woods without even 

 a tent, and when it rained the men peeled bark from the trees and made a rude 

 shelter of it. But as the bark will not always peel, it would happen that the party 

 had to lie down without any covering, and in the journals of Mr. Burwell there 

 are frequent notes of this kind of experience. There was no allowance of tea or 

 cofltee with the rations of flour, pork and peas, and the early records do not give a 

 hint of any other bevei'age. But twenty years after Burwell' s earliest venture as a 

 laud surveyor, when Roswell Mount of Caradoc was provisioning a party to lay 

 out a township on the St. Clair river — it was named St. Clair, but has since been 

 divided into the townships of Sarnia and Moore — he began with the purchase of a 

 barrel of pork, a barrel of flour and a barrel of whiskey. 



We have travelled far since those early days, as witness some articles in the 

 allowance of stationery supplied to the surveyor of ninety years ago, for which he 

 gave to the Surveyor-General a detailed receipt. One item is 25 quills, for although 

 steel pens were made before the close of last century, they did not come into 

 general use until the middle of the present one. Another was a stick of sealing 

 wax to seal letters, long before the days of the envelope. A third was a piece of 

 mouthglue, so comi3letely goue out of use that a specimen of it would be a curiosity 

 now. A fourth was ' ' one Indiau rubber, ' ' and a sample in my possession is as dry 

 and hard and brown as a mummy of the days of old Rameses. There were also 

 papers of ink-powder, black and red, but men under sixty may remember the use 

 of iuk jjowders. Some of us, whose faces have not lost the country bronze, who 

 lived in the country school sections, twelve miles away fi'om the nearest general 

 store, maj^ even recall memories of the fluid we helped to compound in an iron pot 

 from the inner bark of the swamp maple, with green vitriol and sugar added — ink 

 of just a slightly deeper shade of purple than Emperors were wont to use in writing 

 their names, which shone like varnish on the paper and crackled like burning 

 brush when the copy-book was opened, and was viscous enough to arrest a house- 

 fly. I think that I could identify that swamp-maple ink upon the written page 

 after a lapse of ninety years ; yet, in spite of the scrutiny and microscopic economy 

 of the audit office, I am sure that Mr. Burwell was never forced down to the level 

 of using it, at all events not in his official correspondence nor in his journals. But 

 the recx^rds aSbrd not a few illustratious of the inffnitesimal mind that directed the 

 audit office when Francis Gore Avas Lieutenant Governor. One is reminded of 

 Ella's man, John Tipp, of the South Sea House, who thought an accountant the 

 greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it. Auditor 

 is Accountant writ large. 



The surveyors often were annoyed by delays in the passing of their accounts, 

 although it happened sometimes that the Receiver General was more to blame than 

 the Auditor — when there was no money in the Treasury. This, howcAcr, is slightly 

 a diversion, and I come back again to the subject. 



Mr. Burwell was enjoined to read his instructions carefully, and not to leave 

 Toronto until satisfled tliat he understood them ; and he was directed without lo.ss 



