Beschreibung:

The domed agate handle to a figural collar, depicting three knights in armour, with turquoise fleur-de-lys spacers, the mount collet-set with pear-shaped garnets, to a circular agate matrix engraved with the armorial and orders suspended, presented in fitted case Length: 11.2cm, matrix: diameter: 2.1cm Note: Charles Nasmyth was born on 22 September 1825, the son of Robert Nasmyth, F.R.C.S. (Ed.), of Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. He attended the Scottish Naval and Military Academy, where he was awarded the First Prize in Hindustani in 1843. In 1843-44 he was at the East India Company Military Seminary at Addiscombe, and by the end of 1845, was appointed a Second Lieutenant in the Bombay Artillery, and promoted to Lieutenant in early 1850. He returned to England in 1853 due to ill health blaming his service in Guzerat. as it was said to have aided his recovery if he changed the air and headed to the Mediterranean. After a short stay in Malta he went to Constantinople and it is believed that around this time he was commissioned by The Times as a correspondent. Tours of the regions took him to Omar Pasha’s camp at Shumla and the province of Dobrudscha after it had been evacuated by the Turks. From there he provided information for Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, H.B.M. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and for The Times. Nasmyth arrived at the town of Silistria on the Danube before it was besieged by the Russians in March 1854, and, with Captain Butler of the Ceylon Rifles, offered his services to the garrison. These two young officers were said to be ‘exercising a strange mastery over the garrison’ and were ‘obeyed with touching affection and trustfulness by the Ottoman soldiers.’ Throughout Nasmyth contributed a narrative of the siege to The Times. The following was reported by Nasmyth’s in The Times written at the time of the siege: ‘The Turkish army may well talk with pride. Their opponents had an army on the right bank of the Danube which at one time amounted to 60,000 men. They had sixty guns in position, and threw upwards of 50,000 shot and shell, besides an incalculable quantity of small-arm ammunition. They constructed more than three miles of approaches, and sprang six mines; yet during forty days not one inch of ground was gained, and they abandoned the siege, leaving the petty fieldwork against which their principal efforts had been directed a shapeless mass from the effects of their mines and batteries, but still in possession of its original defenders.’ He was rewarded by the Turkish Government with the award of the Order of the Medjidie, 3rd Class, the Turkish General Service Medal in gold and the Medal for the Defence of Silistria. At the same time, he was transferred from the East India Company’s service to H.M. Army on 15 September 1854, in the rank of Captain, unattached, and was awarded a Brevet of Major ‘for his distinguished services in the Defence of Silistria’. The H.E.I.C. allowed him half-pay as a Lieutenant. Nasmyth would serve further in the army during the war in Crimea and was present at the battles of Alma, Inkermann, and the early stages of the siege of Sebastopol. In 1855, he was among those to whom Queen Victoria presented Crimea Medals at a parade in Hyde Park. The Freedom of The City of Edinburgh was given to him and is recorded as ‘in testimony of the admiration entertained by his Fellow-Citizens of his heroic conduction in defence of Silistria and is services in the glorious victories of Alma and Balaclava’.