A colonial civil servant reporting planter atrocities was himself dismissed and blamed.

Evidence

What happened to Valck and his letter? He was not destined for long in the civil service. Less than a year after his appointment in Deli, he was, as noted above, transferred (in February 1877) to Java, while an official investigation of his “serious misconduct” continued after his departure. The following year he was honorably dismissed from the civil service with a meager pension and placed on the retired list at the relatively young age of forty-three. The Resident Locker de Bruijne, reprimanded for allocating too much responsibility to Valck and for blaming the latter for his own mistakes, emerged from the inquiry with his character, though not his position, intact. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1115