r - straight quotes don't read in gdata:::read.xls

Question

I am playing with reading in text in different formats and I noticed that using a csv file that looks like this:

A   B
The dog "was" here  yes

the read.csv function reads the data in how I'd expect with the straight quotes.

> read.csv("Book1.csv")
                   A    B
1 The dog "was" here yes

However, when converting the file as a .xlsx and using gdata:::read.xls the quotes are read in as \\, not as expected. Is this an error in something I'm not setting? If not is this something I should report to the package maintainer?

library(gdata)
read.xls("Book1.xlsx")

> read.xls("Book1.xlsx")
                     A    B
1 The dog \\was\\ here yes