Contradictory secondhand accounts eclipsed eyewitness testimonies of the event

Evidence

“What happened” at the Harmonie Club that evening has been told through abbreviated narratives in wildly contradictory accounts borne of third-hand knowledge, primarily in synoptic form. But it has also been told in vivid detail in testimonies by those present in a set of transcribed narratives, which have never been referred to in any published accounts that I have read. Eight days after the event, Governor-General Rochussen still did not know what had actually transpired. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 488

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did those transcribed eyewitness narratives never surface in published history? What archival trail explains their suppression?
• XREF: This epistemic gap between eyewitness archive and canonical narrative resonates with the general theme of colonial archival knowledge in this study and with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale method of reconstructing from neglected primary sources. — connects to: Eyewitness immediacy can falsely certify a disaster’s end while slow violence continues — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 614