About January 1843, on the orders of the acting Settlement Engineer, Captain D.H. Stevenson, the slab was blown to pieces to clear and widen the passageway at the Singapore River mouth to make space for Fort Fullerton and the quarters of its commander. Some sources claim that the Superintendent of Public Works, George Drumgoole Coleman, was responsible for the Stone's destruction, but he was on leave and not in Singapore at the time of its blasting. Lieutenant-Colonel James Low had petitioned to have the sandstone slab spared, but had been told that it was in the way of a projected bungalow. On the explosion taking place, he crossed the river from his office and selected fragments that had letters on them. As the fragments were very bulky, he had them chiselled into small slabs by a Chinese man. He selected some of the smaller fragments bearing the most legible parts of the inscription and sent them to the Royal Asiatic Society's museum in Calcutta (now known as the Indian Museum) for analysis, where they arrived in about June 1848.