"Before proceeding to reply to Captain Rigby's letter, paragraph by paragraph, I would briefly premise with the following remarks:—
"Being ordered to report myself to Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, and having been placed under his direction, I admitted his friendly interference, and allowed him to apply to H.H. the Sultan for a guide and an escort. Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton offered to defray, from public funds, which he understood to be at his disposal, certain expenses of the Expedition, and he promised, as reward to the guide and escort, sums of money, to which, had I been unfettered, I should have objected as exorbitant. But in all cases the promises made by the late Consul were purely conditional, depending entirely upon the satisfactory conduct of those employed. These facts are wholly omitted in Captain Rigby's reports.
"2. Captain Rigby appears to mean that the Kafila Bashi, the Beloch sepoys, and the porters received nothing whatever on my return to Zanzibar, in March last, from the interior of Africa because the funds supplied to me by the Royal Geographical Society for the expenditure of the Expedition, had been exhausted, besides the sum of one thousand pounds (£1000) granted by the Foreign Office. I had expended from my own private resources nearly fourteen hundred pounds (£1400), and I was ready to expend more had the expenditure been called for. But, though prepared on these occasions to reward liberally for good service, I cannot see the necessity, or rather I see the unadvisability, of offering a premium to notorious misconduct. This was fully explained by me to Captain Rigby on my return to Zanzibar.
"3. Captain Rigby 'understands' that the party of Beloch sepoys, consisting of a Jemadar and twelve armed men, were promised a monthly salary of five dollars each. This was not the case. Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton advanced to the Jemadar twenty-five, and to each sepoy twenty dollars for an outfit; he agreed that I should provide them with daily rations, and he promised them an ample reward from the public funds in case of good behaviour. These men deserved nothing; I ignore their 'fidelity' and 'perseverance,' and I assert that if I passed safely through an unexplored country, it was in no wise by their efforts. On hearing of Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton's death, they mutinied in a body. At the Tanganyika Lake they refused to escort me during the period of navigation, a month of danger and difficulty. When Captain Speke proposed to explore the Nyanza Lake, they would not march without a present of a hundred dollars' worth of cloth. On every possible occasion they clamoured for bakshish, which, under pain of endangering the success of the Expedition, could not always be withheld. They were often warned by me that they were forfeiting all hopes of a future reward, and, indeed, they ended by thinking so themselves. They returned to Zanzibar with a number of slaves, purchased by them with money procured from the Expedition. I would not present either guide or escort to the Consul; but I did not think it my duty to oppose a large reward, said to be 2300 dollars, given to them by H.H. the Sultan, and I reported his liberality and other acts of kindness to the Bombay Government on my arrival at Aden. This fact will, I trust, exonerate me from any charge of wishing to suppress my obligations.
"4. The Banyan Ramjee, head clerk of the Custom House, did not, as is stated by Captain Rigby, procure me ten (10) men who accompanied the Expedition as porters; nor were these men, as is asserted (in par. 6), 'slaves belonging to deewans or petty chiefs on the opposite mainland.' It is a notorious fact that these men were private slaves, belonging to the Banyan Ramjee, who hired them to me direct, and received from me as their pay, for six months, thirty dollars each; a sum for which, as I told him, he might have bought them in the bazaar. At the end of six months I was obliged to dismiss these slaves, who, as is usually the case with the slaves of Indian subjects at Zanzibar, were mutinous in the extreme. At the same time, I supplied them with cloth, to enable them to rejoin their patron. On my return from the Tanganyika Lake, they requested leave to accompany me back to Zanzibar, which I permitted, with the express warning that they were not to consider themselves re-engaged. The Banyan, their proprietor, had, in fact, sent them on a trading trip into the interior under my escort, and I found them the most troublesome of the party. When Ramjee applied for additional pay, after my return to Zanzibar, I told him that I had engaged them for six months; that I had dismissed them at the end of six months, as was left optional to me; and that he had already received an unusual sum for their services. This conversation appears in a distorted form and improperly represented in the concluding sentence of Captain Rigby's 6th paragraph.
"5 and 6. With respect to the two men sent on with supplies after the Expedition had left Zanzibar, they were not paid, on account of the prodigious disappearance of the goods entrusted to their charge, as I am prepared to prove from the original journals in my possession. They were dismissed with their comrades, and never afterwards, to the best of my remembrance, did a day's work.
"7 and 8. The Kafilah Bashi received from me for the first journey to Usumbara fifty (50) dollars. Before my departure in the second Expedition he was presented by Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton with five hundred (500) dollars, almost double what he had expected. He was also promised, in case of good conduct, a gold watch, and an ample reward, which, however, was to be left to the discretion of his employers. I could not recommend him through Captain Rigby to the Government for remuneration. His only object seemed to be that of wasting our resources and of collecting slaves in return for the heavy presents made to the native chiefs by the Expedition, and the consequence of his carelessness or dishonesty was, that the expenditure on the whole march, until we had learnt sufficient to supervise him, was inordinate. When the Kafilah Bashi at last refused to accompany Captain Speke to the Nyanza Lake, he was warned that he also was forfeiting all claim to future reward, and when I mentioned this circumstance to Captain Rigby at Zanzibar, he then agreed with me that the 500 dollars originally advanced were sufficient.
"9. With regard to the statement of Said bin Salim concerning the non-payment of the seventy-three porters, I have to remark that it was mainly owing to his own fault. The men did not refuse to accompany me because I wished to diverge from the 'correct route,' nor was I so unreasonable as to expect them to venture into the jaws of the slave-trade. Several caravans that had accompanied us on the down-march, as well as the porters attached to the Expedition, were persuaded by the slaves of Ramjee (because Zanzibar was a nearer way to their homes) not to make Kilwa. The pretext of the porters was simply that they would be obliged to march back for three days. An extra remuneration was offered to them; they refused it, and left in a body. Shortly before their departure Captain Speke proposed to pay them for their services, but being convinced that they might be prevented from desertion, I did not judge it advisable by paying them, to do what would be virtually dismissing them. After they had proceeded a few miles, Said bin Salim was sent to recall them, on conditions which they would have accepted; he delayed, lost time, and ended by declaring that he could not travel without his dinner. Another party was instantly sent; they also loitered on the way, and thus the porters reached the coast and dispersed. Before their departure I rewarded the Kirangozi, or chief man of the caravan, who had behaved well in exhorting his followers to remain with us. I was delayed in a most unhealthy region for the arrival of some down porters, who consented to carry our goods to the coast; and to prove to them that money was not my object, I paid the newly engaged gang as if they had marched the whole way. Their willingness to accompany me is the best proof that I had not lost the confidence of the people. Finally, on arrival at the coast, I inquired concerning those porters who had deserted us, and was informed by the Diwan and headman of the village that they had returned to their homes in the interior, after a stay of a few days on the seaboard. This was a regrettable occurrence, but such events are common on the slave-path in Eastern Africa, and the established custom of the Arabs and other merchants, whom I had consulted upon the subject before leaving the interior, is not to encourage desertion by paying part of the hire, or by settling for porterage before arriving at the coasts. Of the seven gangs of porters engaged on this journey, only one, an unusually small proportion, left me without being fully satisfied.
"10. That Said bin Salim, and Ramjee, the Banyan, should have appealed to Captain Rigby, according to the fashion of Orientals, after my departure from Zanzibar, for claims which they should have advanced when I refused to admit them, I am not astonished. But I must express my extreme surprise that Captain Speke should have written two private letters, forcibly pointing out the claims of these men to Captain Rigby, without having communicated the circumstance in any way to me, the chief of the Expedition. I have been in continued correspondence with that officer since my departure from Zanzibar, and until this moment I have been impressed with the conviction that Captain Speke's opinion as to the claims of the guide and escort above alluded to was identical with my own.
"11. With respect to the last paragraph of Captain Rigby's letter, proposing that a shawl or some small mark of satisfaction should be presented by Government to Ladha Damha, the Custom-master at Zanzibar, for his assistance to the Expedition, I distinctly deny the gratuitous assertions that I was entirely dependent on him for money and supplies; that he advanced considerable sums of money without any security; that he forwarded all requisite supplies, or, as Captain Speke affirms, that he afforded the Expedition every assistance in the most handsome manner. Before quitting Zanzibar for inner Africa, I settled all accounts with him, and left a small balance in his hands, and I gave, for all subsequent supplies, an order upon Messrs. Forbes, my agent in Bombay. He, like the other Hindus at Zanzibar, utterly neglected me after the death of Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton; and Captain Rigby has probably seen some of the letters of complaint which were sent by me from the interior. In fact, my principal merit in having conducted the Expedition to a successful issue is in having contended against the utter neglect of the Hindus at Zanzibar (who had promised to Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, in return for his many good offices, their interest and assistance), and against the carelessness and dishonesty, the mutinous spirit, and the active opposition of the guide and escort.