Francis Rawdon Chesney (16 March 1789 – 30 January 1872) was a British general and explorer. Life He was a son of Captain Alexander Chesney, an Irishman of Scottish descent who, having emigrated to South Carolina in 1772, served under Lord Rawdon (afterwards Marquess of Hastings) in the American War of Independence, and subsequently received an appointment as coast officer at Annalong, County Down, Ireland. F. R. Chesney was born there, on 16 March 1789. Lord Rawdon gave the boy a cadetship at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and he was gazetted to the Royal Artillery in 1805. But though he rose to be lieutenant-general and colonel-commandant of the 14th brigade Royal Artillery (1864), and general in 1868, Chesney's memory lives not for his military record, but for his connection with the Suez Canal, and with the exploration of the Euphrates valley, which started with his being sent out to Constantinople in the course of his military duties in 1829, and his making a tour of inspection in Egypt and Syria. In 1830, after taking command of 7th Company, 4th Battalion Royal Artillery in Malta, he submitted a report on the feasibility of making a Suez Canal. This was the original basis of Lesseps' great undertaking (in 1869 Lesseps greeted him in Paris as the "father " of the canal). However, before the creation of the Suez Canal, Chesney wanted to test an alternative route to India. He reached Istanbul in April 1832 and concluded in his report that the Euphrates should be traversable for suitable steamers. For the next three years, Chesney undertook a campaign in order to persuade the government to accept a trial experiment of the Euphrates route. After lengthy reports and meetings, the British government finally accepted in early 1835 to send two iron-hulled steamboats, the Euphrates and the Tigris, to survey the long stretch of the river Euphrates from the Anatolian mountains to the Persian Gulf. The objective of the party was twofold; firstly, to set up a new trade route between Britain and India which avoided the lengthy voyage around the South African Cape of Good Hope. Secondly, it aimed to prevent Russian expansion in the Near East, as some understood it as a threat to Britain's control of India. In 1835, Captain Francis Rawdon Chesney was put in charge of the expedition and carefully selected his associates, about fifty persons in total and