In 1846 he published autobiographical Incidents Connected with the Life of Selim Aga, written in "faultless idiomatic English";[6] it was reissued in 1850. In 1875, the year of Selim's death, his memoirs published in the Geographical Magazine stirred up the public who did not believe that the book was written by an African and not an educated British gentleman. Richard Francis Burton came to his former steward's defence, confirming that Selim was, in fact, an African educated in Scotland, and capable of "... briefly anything... he took all the trouble of life off my hands."[8]