APPENDIX A. 
151 
“ I am to add that there is no evidence before Her Majesty’s 
Grovernment that you had any direct participation in this traffic ; 
and Her Majesty’s Grovernment acquit you of any such partici- 
pation. 
“(Signed) A. H. LAYAEH. 
“ John Petherick, Esq., 
&c., &c.” 
The above document will,, 1 think^ be more to the purpose than 
anything I could say, and therefore I dispense with further com- 
ment, and allow the reader to form his own judgment of the value 
of the charges which directly or indirectly have been launched 
against me. 
I must now beg to retrace my steps to Khartoum. 
On the 31st December, 1863, I received the first intelligence of 
Consul Cameron’s imprisonment by Theodore, and I at once com- 
municated it under fiying seal through Her Majesty’s Agent to the 
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. In concluding my letter, 
I say: 
If Her Majesty’s Government believes me competent, I place 
myself at its disposal for the execution of any mission to the Court 
of Abyssinia.” 
From the circumstance of some slight attention that I had been 
enabled to show the Emperor, through the medium of the visits of 
occasional Abyssinians of rank to Khartoum, and his knowledge 
of the steps I had officially taken, in 1856, to endeavour to induce 
the Egyptian Government to restore a number of captured indi- 
viduals and cattle that had been seized by Egyptian troops on a 
razzia in the free territory of Bogos, the position I held in the 
Soudan was well known to him ; and from my knowledge of the 
