According to Maxwell's papers, when news of the destruction of the sandstone slab reached Bengal, James Prinsep asked the Governor of the Straits Settlements, Colonel William John Butterworth, to secure any legible fragments that might still exist and to send them to the Royal Asiatic Society's museum. Butterworth replied: "The only remaining portion of the stone you mention, except what Colonel Low may have, I have found lying in the verandah of the Treasury at Singapore, where it was used as a seat by the Sepoys of the guard and persons in waiting to transact business. I lost no time in sending it to my house, but, alas! not before the inscription was nearly erased. Such as the fragment was then however – "i.e.", in 1843 – it is now; for I have preserved the stone with much care, and shall have much pleasure in sending it for your museum, having failed to establish one, as I hoped to have done, in Singapore."