John Augustus Lloyd

John Augustus Lloyd (1 May 1800 – 10 October 1854) was an English engineer and surveyor. He was involved in an early survey for a Panama Canal, and undertook works in the Indian Ocean.

Life The youngest son of John Lloyd of King's Lynn, Norfolk, he was born in London on 1 May 1800, and was educated successively at private schools in Tooting and Winchester, and learned some science. When on a visit to Derbyshire he carried a survey of mines at Wirksworth.

The end of the Napoleonic Wars meant Lloyd did not join the army as he desired, but was sent out to his elder brother, who was King's Counsel on Tortola. He spent time on surveying and languages. With an introduction from Sir Robert Ker Porter, he went to Simon Bolivar and was recruited as a captain of engineers, becoming lieutenant-colonel. In November 1827 he was commissioned by Bolivar to survey for Gran Colombia the Isthmus of Panama and possibilities of connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific. In disturbances at Cartagena he was seriously wounded. There Manuel Isidoro Belzu was in power. The two clashed, with Lloyd writing to Sir Fairfax Moresby of the regime's dishonesty. He travelled to Tacna in Peru, seeking naval support. At that period Bolivia had a coastal port at Cobija, now in Chile. The Foreign Office consulted Frederick Wright-Bruce, and backed away from a proposed blockade.

On the outbreak of the Crimean War with Russia, Lloyd started on a mission to stir up the Circassians in the English interest. He was kept in the Crimea after the battle of the Alma to collect information, and died at Therapia of cholera on 10 October 1854, at age 54.

Lloyd published significant surveys, report, charts and journal papers. His report on his Panama survey appeared in Philosophical Transactions in 1830, with supplementary information in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. For the Board of Admiralty and Royal Society, he determined the difference of level in the River Thames between London Bridge and the sea, with a report appeared in Philosophical Transactions for 1831. He made many drawings of Madagascar, and charts, mostly South American.

Apart from his significant contribution to the organisation and management of the Great Exhibition in 1851, he was awarded a Prize Medal in his own right as the inventor of the 'typhodeictor', an instrument for obtaining the bearing and relative position of a storm or hurricane.

Lloyd wrote a number of further papers on Mauritius, South America and mining. A volume Papers relating to Proposals for establishing Colleges of Arts and Manufactures for the Industrial Classes was printed for private circulation, in 1851.

Family Lloyd left a widow Fanny Drummond MacGregor, who was the eldest daughter of the British counsel to Panama, Malcolm MacGregor. They met in Panama when Lloyd was surveying a route for a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific for Simon Bolivar. They were married in St. Cuthbert's Cathedral, Edinburgh, on December 8, 1829, during a return to Britain in 1829 and before leaving for Mauritius in 1831. Two sons held commissions in the British army

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