authorities. Independent of Hyams' testimony, officials in Bermuda had received information that Blackburn had collected a second cache of "contaminated" garments and linens. According to this information, Blackburn contracted with Edward Swan, a hotel owner in St. George's, to store them until mid-1865 and then ship them to New York City, in an attempt to start an outbreak there. Acting on this intelligence, Bermudan officials raided Swan's hotel and found three trunks of garments and linens with stains consistent with the "black vomit" symptomatic of yellow fever. Swan was arrested and charged with violating the local health code. The contents of the trunks were soaked with sulfuric acid and buried. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln just two days after Hyams related his story to Canadian officials heightened U.S. interest in arresting Blackburn to connect the assassination to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his operatives in Canada. The U.S. Bureau of Military Justice ordered Blackburn's arrest for attempted murder, but an arrest could not be effected because Blackburn was in Canada, beyond the Bureau's jurisdiction. The subsequent discovery of the cache of garments and linens in Bermuda convinced Canadian authorities to act. They arrested Blackburn on May 19, 1865, charging him with violation of Canada's neutrality in the Civil War. He was held for trial on $8,000 bond. In October 1865, a Toronto court acquitted Blackburn on grounds that the trunks of garments had been shipped to Nova Scotia, which was out of the court's jurisdiction. A charge of conspiracy to commit murder was dropped after Blackburn's attorney reminded the court that such a charge could only be made if the accused had made an attempt on the life of a head of state. Blackburn did not testify in the trial and only spoke of the plot years later when he denounced it as "too preposterous for intelligent gentlemen to believe." Historians disagree as to the strength of the evidence against Blackburn, and many of the federal and Confederate records relating to the case have been lost. Writing in the journal America's Civil War, U.S. Navy physician J. D. Haines notes that the Confederate agents who testified against Blackburn were of dubious reputation. Hyams in particular received immunity from prosecution and was paid for his testimony. Haines also points out that Blackburn's previous reputation as a humanitarian was ignored; in the hysteria following Lincoln's assassination, conspiracy theories abounded and Northerners were