Part 36

“2. Upon the return of Captain Burton to Zanzibar in March last, from the interior of Africa, he stated that, from the funds supplied him by the Royal Geographical Society for the expenses of the Expedition, he had only a sufficient sum left to defray the passage of himself and Captain Speke to England, and in consequence the persons who accompanied the Expedition from here, viz.: the Kafila Bashi, the Belooch Sepoys, and the porters, received nothing whatever from him on their return.

“3. On quitting Zanzibar for the interior of Africa, the expedition was accompanied by a party of Belooch soldiers, consisting of a Jemadar and twelve armed men. I understand they were promised a monthly salary of five dollars each; they remained with the Expedition for twenty months, and as they received nothing from Captain Burton beyond a few dollars each before starting, his highness the Sultan has generously distributed amongst them the sum of (2300) two thousand three hundred dollars.

“4. The head clerk of the Custom House here, a Banian, by name Ramjee, procured ten men, who accompanied the Expedition as porters; they were promised five dollars each per mensem, and received pay for six months, viz.: thirty dollars each before starting for the interior. They were absent for twenty months, during three of which the Banian Ramjee states that they did not accompany the Expedition. He now claims eleven months’ pay for each of these men, as they have not been paid anything beyond the advance before starting.

“5. The head clerk also states that after the Expedition left Zanzibar, he sent two men to Captain Burton with supplies, one of whom was absent with the Expedition seventeen months, and received nothing whatever; the other, he states, was absent fifteen months, and received six months’ pay, the pay for the remaining nine months being still due to him. Thus his claim amounts to the following sums:--

Ten men for eleven months, at five dollars per man, per month, 550 Dollars. One man for seventeen „ „ „ „ 85 „ One „ nine „ „ „ „ 45 „ --- Total dollars 680

“6. These men were slaves, belonging to ‘deewans,’ or petty chiefs, on the opposite mainland. They travel far into the interior to collect and carry down ivory to the coast, and are absent frequently for the space of two or three years. When hired out, the pay they receive is equally divided between the slave and the master. Captain Speke informs me, that when these men were hired, it was agreed that one-half of their hire should be paid to the men, and the other half to Ramjee on account of their owners. When Ramjee asked Captain Burton for their pay, on his return here, he declined to give him anything, saying that they had received thirty dollars each on starting, and that he could have bought them for a less sum.

“7. The Kafila Bashi, or chief Arab, who accompanied the Expedition, by name Said bin Salem, was twenty-two months with Captain Burton. He states, that on the first journey to Pangany and Usumbara, he received fifty (50) dollars from Captain Burton; and that before starting on the last expedition, to discover the Great Lake, the late Lieutenant-Colonel Hamerton presented him with five hundred dollars on behalf of Government for the maintenance of his family during his absence. He states that he did not stipulate for any monthly pay, as Colonel Hamerton told him, that if he escorted the gentlemen to the Great Lake in the interior, and brought them in safety back to Zanzibar, he would be handsomely rewarded; and both Captain Speke and Mr. Apothecary Frost inform me that Colonel Hamerton frequently promised Said bin Salem that he should receive a thousand dollars and a gold watch if the Expedition were successful.

“8. As it appeared to me that Colonel Hamerton had received no authority from Government to defray any part of the expenses of this Expedition, and probably made these promises thinking that if the exploration of the unknown interior were successful a great national object would be attained, and that the chief man who conducted the Expedition would be liberally rewarded, and as Captain Burton had been furnished with funds to defray the expenses, I told him that I did not feel authorised to make any payment without the previous sanction of Government, and Said bin Salem has therefore received nothing whatever since his return.

“9. Said Bin Salem also states, that on the return of the Expedition from Lake Tanganyika, (70) seventy natives of the country were engaged as porters, and accompanied the Expedition for three months; and that on arriving at a place called ‘Kootoo,’ a few days’ journey from the sea-coast, Captain Burton wished them to diverge from the correct route to the coast opposite Zanzibar, to accompany him south to Keelwa; but they refused to do so, saying that none of their people ever dared to venture to Keelwa; that the chief slave-trade on the east coast is carried on. No doubt their fears were well grounded. These men received nothing in payment for their three months’ journey, and, as no white man had ever penetrated into their country previously, I fear that any future traveller will meet with much inconvenience in consequence of these poor people not having been paid.

“10. As I considered that my duty connected with the late Expedition was limited to affording it all the aid and support in my power, I have felt very reluctant to interfere with anything connected with the non-payment of these men; but Said bin Salem and Ramjee having appealed to me, and Captain Speke, since his departure from Zanzibar, having written me two private letters, pointing out so forcibly the claims of these men, the hardships they endured, and the fidelity and perseverance they showed, conducting them safely through unexplored countries, and stating also that the agreements with them were entered into at the British Consulate, and that they considered they were serving the British Government, that I deem it my duty to bring their claims to the notice of Government; for I feel that if these men remain unpaid, after all they have endured in the service of British officers, our name for good faith in these countries will suffer, and that any future travellers wishing to further explore the interesting countries of the interior will find no persons willing to accompany them from Zanzibar, or the opposite mainland.

“11. As there was no British agent at Zanzibar for thirteen months after the death of Colonel Hamerton, the Expedition was entirely dependent on Luddah Damha, the Custom-master here, for money and supplies. He advanced considerable sums of money without any security, forwarded all requisite supplies, and, Captain Speke says, afforded the Expedition every assistance, in the most handsome manner. Should Government, therefore, be pleased to present him with a shawl, or some small mark of satisfaction, I am confident he is fully deserving of it, and it would gratify a very worthy man to find that his assistance to the Expedition is acknowledged.

“I have, &c., “(Signed) C. P. RIGBY, Captain, “H. M.’s Consul and British Agent, Zanzibar.”

3.

“East India United Service Club, St. James’s Square,

11th November, 1859.

“Sir,--I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your official letter, dated the 8th of November, 1859, forwarding for my information copy of a letter, addressed by Captain Rigby, Her Majesty’s consul and agent at Zanzibar, to the Government of Bombay, respecting the non-payment of certain persons, hired by me to accompany the Expedition under my command into Equatorial Africa, and apprising me that Sir C. Wood especially desires to be informed, why I took no steps to bring the services of the men who accompanied me, and my obligations to them, to the notice of the Bombay Government.

“In reply to Sir Charles Wood I have the honour to state that, as the men alluded to rendered me no services, and as I felt in no way obliged to them, I would not report favourably of them. The Kafilah Bashi, the Jemadar, and the Baloch were servants of H.H. Sayyid Majid, in his pay and under his command; they were not hired by me, but by the late Lieut.-Col. Hamerton, H.M.’s Consul and H.E.I.C.’s agent at Zanzibar, and they marched under the Arab flag. On return to Zanzibar, I reported them as undeserving of reward to Lieut.-Col. Hamerton’s successor, Capt. Rigby, and after return to England, when my accounts were sent in to the Royal Geographical Society, I appended a memorandum, that as those persons had deserved no reward, no reward had been applied for.

“Before proceeding to reply to Capt. Rigby’s letter, paragraph by paragraph, I would briefly premise with the following remarks.

“Being ordered to report myself to Lieut.-Col. 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.-Col. 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 Capt. Rigby’s reports.

“2. Capt. Rigby appears to mean that the Kafila Bashi, the Baloch 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 (1000_l._) one thousand pounds, granted by the Foreign Office, I had expended from private resources nearly (1400_l._) fourteen hundred pounds, 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 Capt. Rigby on my return to Zanzibar.

“3. Capt. Rigby ‘_understands_’ that the party of Baloch sepoys, consisting of a Jemadar and twelve armed men, were promised a monthly salary of 5 dollars each. This was not the case. Lieut.-Col. Hamerton advanced to the Jemadar 25, and to each sepoy 20 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.-Col. 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 Capt. 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 2,300 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 Ramji, head clerk of the Custom House, did not, as is stated by Capt. Rigby, procure me (10) ten 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 Ramji 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 Capt. 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 intrusted 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 (50) fifty dollars. Before my departure in the second Expedition he was presented by Lieut. Colonel Hamerton with (500) five hundred 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 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 Ramji, 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 agents 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.

“I admit that I was careful that these men should suffer for their misconduct. On the other hand, I was equally determined that those who did their duty should be adequately rewarded,--a fact which nowhere appears in Captain Rigby’s letter. The Portuguese servants, the negro-gun carriers, the several African gangs of porters, with their leaders, and all other claimants, were fully satisfied. The bills drawn in the interior, from the Arab merchants, were duly paid at Zanzibar, and on departure I left orders that if anything had been neglected it should be forwarded to me in Europe. I regret that Captain Rigby, without thoroughly ascertaining the merits of the case (which he evidently has not done), should not have permitted me to record any remarks which I might wish to offer, before making it a matter of appeal to the Bombay Government.

“Finally, I venture to hope that Captain Rigby has forwarded the complaints of those who have appealed to him without endorsing their validity; and I trust that these observations upon the statements contained in his letter may prove that these statements were based upon no foundation of fact.

“I am, Sir, “Your obedient Servant, “R. F. BURTON, “Bombay Army.”

4.

“India Office, E. C., 14th January, 1860.

“Sir,--I am directed by the Secretary of State for India in council, to inform you that, having taken into consideration the explanations afforded by you in your letter of the 11th November, together with the information on the same subject furnished by Captain Speke, he is of opinion that it was your duty, knowing, as you did, that demands for wages, on the part of certain Belochs and others who accompanied you into Equatorial Africa, existed against you, not to have left Zanzibar without bringing these claims before the consul there, with a view to their being adjudicated on their own merits, the more especially as the men had been originally engaged through the intervention or the influence of the British authorities, whom, therefore, it was your duty to satisfy before leaving the country. Had this course been followed, the character of the British Government would not have suffered, and the adjustment of the dispute would, in all probability, have been effected at a comparatively small outlay.

“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.

“Sir,--I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your official letter of the 14th 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 circumstances of their dismissal without payment in my official letter of the 11th November, 1859.

“Although impaired health and its consequences 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.