of an English lad named Arthur Orton; and the Claimant thereupon said that he must have been mistaken in thanking her, and acknowledging it as his.  In the town of Melipilla—­sixty or seventy miles inland from Valparaiso—­everyone of the sixteen or seventeen persons mentioned by the Claimant as old acquaintances—­except those who were dead or gone away—­came before the Commission, and were examined.  They proved to have substantially but one tale to tell.  They said they never knew any one of the name of Tichborne.  Melipilla is a remote little towns far off the great high road, and the only English person, except an English doctor there established, who had ever sojourned there, was a sailor lad who, not in 1853, but in 1849, came to them destitute; was kindly treated; picked up Spanish enough to converse in an illiterate way; said his name was Arthur, and was always called Arthur by them; declared his father was “a butcher named Orton, who served the queen;” and said he had been sent to sea to cure St. Vitus’s Dance, but had been ill-used by the captain, and ran away from his ship at Valparaiso.  This lad, they stated, sojourned in Melipilla eighteen months, and finally went back to Valparaiso and re-embarked for England.  Don Tomas Castro, the doctor’s wife, and others, declared they recognised the features of this lad in the portrait of the Claimant; and being shown two daguerreotype portraits of Roger Tichborne, taken in Chili when he was there, said that the features were not like those of any person they had ever known.  Searches were then made in the records of the consul’s office at Valparaiso, from which it resulted that a sailor named Arthur Orton did desert from the English ship “Ocean” in that port at the very date mentioned, and did re-embark, though under the name of “Joseph M. Orton,” about eighteen months later.

To Boisdale, in Australia, the Commission then repaired, and though this is many thousands of miles from South America, but here similar discoveries were made.  Mr. William Foster, the extensive cattle farmer, was dead, but the widow still managed his large property.  In reference to the Claimant’s statement that in July, 1854, the very day after he was landed by the vessel which he believed was named the “Osprey,” at Melbourne, he was engaged by Mr. William Foster, and went with him at once to Gippsland, under the assumed name of Thomas Castro, the lady declared that her husband did not settle at Boisdale, or have anything to do with that property till two years later than that date, and that they never had any herdsman named Thomas Castro.  The ledgers and other account books of Mr. Foster were then examined, but no mention of any Castro, either in 1854 or at any other time, could be found.  On the other hand, there were numerous entries, extending over the two years 1857 and 1858, of wages paid and rations served out to a herdsman named Arthur Orton, whom the lady perfectly well remembered, and who had come to them from Hobart Town.