"Your letter, and that of Captain Speke, will be forwarded to the Government of Bombay, with whom it will rest to determine whether you shall be held pecuniarily responsible for the amount which has been paid in liquidation of the claims against you.
"I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
"(Signed) J. Cosmo Melvill."
5.
"January, 1860.
"Sir,—I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your official letter of the 14th of January, 1860.
"In reply, I have the honour to observe that, not having been favoured with a copy of the information on the same subject furnished to you by Captain Speke, I am not in a position to understand on what grounds the Secretary of State for India in Council should have arrived at so unexpected a decision as regards the alleged non-payment of certain claims made by certain persons sent with me into the African interior.
"I have the honour to observe that I did not know that demands for wages existed against me on the part of those persons, and that I believed I had satisfactorily explained the circumstance of their dismissal without payment in my official letter of the 11th of November, 1859.
"Although impaired health and its consequence prevented me from proceeding in an official form to the adjudication of the supposed claims in the presence of the Consular authority, I represented the whole question to Captain Rigby, who, had he then—at that time—deemed it his duty to interfere, might have insisted upon adjudicating the affair with me, or with Captain Speke, before we left Zanzibar.