This collection consists of State Department copies of documents sent by British Ambassador Lord Lyons to U. S. Secretary of State William H. Seward on 8 August 1863, now being forwarded, on 13 August, to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, accompanied by a cover letter signed by Seward. The case itself was months old, and had spawned a good deal of paperwork prior to the appearance of this particular batch of documents. The two key items are; 1) a seven-page affidavit of Quinn's describing the circumstances of his entrapment, given to Edward M. Archibald, the British consul in New York, on 13 June 1863; and 2) an eight-page letter from Archibald to Lord Lyons, making the case for Quinn's innocence and the inadequacy of the initial U. S. response of the previous March.