IOR/V/10/553/1

Annual administration report of the Aden Settlement, providing a summary record of the main events and developments in each department of the Administration of Aden during the financial year 1866-67. The report is addressed by Lieutenant-Colonel William L Merewether, Resident at Aden, to the Secretary to Government, Bombay, and is dated 5 June 1867. It is arranged in sixty-five numbered paragraphs (Nos. 2-66), some of which include tables of statistics. The paragraphs are not preceded by titles or headings. The report does not contain a table of contents or appendices.

Matters covered by the report include the following:

• Civil suits
• Trials and convictions
• The jail
• External trade of Aden
• Import and exports
• Trade with Abyssinia [eastern Africa including parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia]
• Returns from the sale of stamps
• Public works – military and civil
• Water stores
• Barracks accommodation
• Communications
• Receipts and disbursements of the Aden Treasury
• Civil establishments and salaries
• The Government school
• Administrative management of the settlement
• Affairs relating to the Foodhlee [Faḍlī] and Abdallee [Abdalī] tribes
• Security and policing
• The Abyssinian Mission and the state of affairs in Abyssinia
• The fleeing to Aden of the sister of the Sooltan [Sulṭān] of Zanzibar, Princess Saleema [Sayyida Sālmah bint Sa‘īd, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, later Emily Ruete] her marriage to the German merchant Mr Reute, and their departure for Hamburgh [Hamburg]
• The Treaty in February 1866 with the ‘chief Sooltan of the Mijjertyn [Mijertyn] tribe’
• Statistics on the strength of the garrison of Aden
• Works funded by the Municipal Fund
• A reformatory established for ‘vagabond Somallee [Somali] boys who were known to be inveterate thieves’
• The Government gardens as Huswah [Al-Huswah] and Lahej
• Water supplies and the lack of rain
• Statistics of cases treated in the civil hospital
• Vaccination and smallpox statistics.