expedition to Tibet in 1888, when a force of European and native troops crossed the frontier and, after a few skirmishes with the Tibetans, occupied the Chumbi valley which we certainly should have retained. As, how¬ ever, the history of this expedition has been fully written and I had no part in it, I will say no more on the subject.
I had an invitation from C.B. Clarke to spend a month with him at Shillong in the Khasia hills, and gladly availed myself of this chance to see a new and most interesting country which has never been better described than in Hooker’s Himalayan Journals. I therefore packed up all my collections, paid off my servants and settled up my expenses with the Paymaster’s Office at Calcutta, which led to some curious correspondence. I had kept vouchers for all the expenses which, under my agreement with the Government, were incurred since my arrival at Calcutta, and I was careful to leave out everything about which there could be any reasonable doubt. But the clerks in the Paymaster’s Department seemed to think that they would not be justifying their existence if they did not cut off a little here and a little there, and they took particular objection to a charge for horseshoes and shoeing which had been paid to the Farrier Sergeant of the mountain battery at Darjeeling. I had at last to write a letter pointing out that I was not in the habit of falsifying accounts or attempt¬ ing to rob the Government, and that if they would not pay the account in full I would take nothing at all but submit the matter to the India Office when I got home. I was told that no one in the service in India would venture to do this, as it would bring them into bad colour with the Paymaster’s Department, and that it was quite simple to add on to other items what had been cut off from the disputed ones. Whether the correspondence ever reached the desk of the Paymaster-General or not I cannot say, but I eventually carried my point.
Our mules, after staying three months on the ridge where they were obliged to remain picketed, were sent down to the plains, leaving an immense mass of refuse and manure. A neighbouring tea planter thought that this would make some very useful manure for his plantation and wrote to the officer in charge of the station to know whether he might remove it, This gentleman, who was a bit of a wag, replied officially to say that at present “ he had no instruction to dispose of the only tangible results of the late embassy to Tibet.” This joke was told every¬ where and made poor Macaulay furious; in fact, I believe that he never got over the disappointment and loss of kudos which the failure of his scheme entailed. We parted very amicably, but I never saw him again, and he died in India a few years later.
