SMITHSONIAN BEQUEST. HI 



New York, and tender my thanks for your kind congratu- 

 lations on my return to my own country, and on the success 

 of the public business confided to nic. Your letter went on 

 to New York, as directed, but was returned ; and I received 

 it at my home, near the cit}'. 



My No. 31, written after I had landed, wdll have informed 

 you that I had then received tlie instructions of the Secretary 

 of the Treasury to which your letter refers, and I have sinca 

 been in correspondence with him. Owing to the delay in 

 getting the ship into the dock, I was not able to leave New 

 York with the gold until the first of this month, when I 

 arrived with it, accompanied by two agents from the Bank 

 of America, that institution having, at the request of the 

 Secretary of the Treasury, obligingly afforded me every 

 facility in its power towards the business I had in hand. I 

 did not, however, feel at liberty to withdraw my own per- 

 sonal superintendence from the operation of transferring the 

 gold, until I saw it deposited at the Mint. Thither I imme- 

 diately had it conveyed on reaching this city on the 1st in- 

 stant, the director and Treasurer of the Mint having been 

 in readiness to receive it under the previous information of 

 its intended transfer, which I had requested the bank to 

 transmit. The entire sum contained in the eleven boxes 

 which I delivered to those two officers of the Mint on Satur- 

 day, was £104,960 85. 6d. — the whole in English sovereigns, 

 except the change ; and I have now the satisfaction of in- 

 forming you that official receipts of this amount from my 

 hands have been forwarded to the Treasury Department. 



The excess of this sum over that which I had computed 

 in my No. 30 as the probable amount to be left in my hands, 

 arises from the president of the bank having undertaken, 

 at my suggestion, to pay the freight and other shipping- 

 charges due at New York; the Jbank to be repaid by the 

 Treasury. The freight was three-eighthsof one per cent. — 

 this being the usual charge in the packet-ships — and came 

 to £393 12.S. Primage was £19 135. 8d. ; and the charges 

 on bringing over the Smithsonian boxes (left in the custody 

 of the collector, from whom I had every facility on landing) 

 were to have been £3 8s. 5d., or thereabouts.* 



It seemed to me that it would be best for the bank to pay 

 all these charges, as the most convenient mode of settling 

 without delay with the ship-owners, to whom I had become 

 responsible by my engagements with the captain in Lon- 



* There proved to be fourteen of these boxes, the additional one contain- 

 ing a picture, of which I had not heard at the date of my No. 28. 



