THE

OREGON TERRITORY,

ITS

HISTORY AND DISCOVERY;

INCLUDING AN ACCOUNT OF

THE CONVENTION OF THE ESCURIAL,

ALSO,

THE TREATIES AND NEGOTIATIONS

BETWEEN

THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN,

HELD AT VARIOUS TIMES FOR THE SETTLEMENT OF

A BOUNDARY LINE,

AND

AN EXAMINATION OF THE WHOLE QUESTION

IN RESPECT TO

FACTS AND THE LAW OF NATIONS.

BY
TRAVERS TWISS, D.C.L., F.R.S.,
PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD,
AND ADVOCATE IN DOCTORS’ COMMONS.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON & CO., 200 BROADWAY.
PHILADELPHIA:
GEO. S. APPLETON, 148 CHESNUT-STREET.
CINCINNATI:—DERBY, BRADLEY & CO., 113 MAIN-STREET.
MDCCCXLVI.

PREFACE.

The object which the author had in view, in instituting the accompanying inquiry into the historical facts and the negotiations connected with the Oregon Territory, was to contribute, as far as his individual services might avail, to the peaceful solution of the question at issue between the United States of America and Great Britain. He could not resist the conviction, on reading several able treatises on the subject, that the case of the United States had been overstated by her writers and negotiators; and the perusal of Mr. Greenhow’s Official Memoir, and subsequent History of Oregon and California, confirmed him in this impression, as they sought to establish more than was consistent with the acknowledged difficulty of a question, which has now been the subject of four fruitless negotiations. He determined, in consequence of this conviction, to investigate carefully the records of ancient discoveries and other matters of history connected with the North-west coast of America, concerning which much contradictory statement is to be met with in writers of acknowledged reputation. The result is, the present work, which has unavoidably assumed a much larger bulk than was anticipated by the author when he commenced the inquiry: it is hoped, however, that the arrangement of the chapters will enable the reader to select, without difficulty, those portions of the subject which he may deem to be most deserving of his attention.

The expeditions of Drake and of Gali have thus necessarily come under consideration; and the views of the author will be found to differ, in respect to both these navigators, from those advanced by Mr. Greenhow, more especially in respect to Drake. Had the author noticed at an earlier period Mr. Greenhow’s remark in the Preface to the second edition of his History, that he has “never deviated from the rule of not citing authorities at second-hand,” he would have thought it right to apologise for attributing the incorrectness of Mr. Greenhow’s statements as to the respective accounts of Drake’s expedition, to his having been misled by the authority of the article “Drake,” in the Biographie Universelle. He would even now apologise, were not any other supposition under the circumstances less respectful to Mr. Greenhow himself.

In regard to Juan de Fuca, if the author could have supposed that in the course of the last negotiations at Washington, Mr. Buchanan would have pronounced that De Fuca’s Voyage “no longer admits of reasonable doubt,” he would have entered into a more careful analysis of Michael Lock’s tale, to show that it is utterly irreconcileable with ascertained facts. As it is, however, the author trusts that enough has been said in the chapter on the Pretended Discoveries of the North-west Coast, to convince the reader that both the stories of Juan de Fuca and Maldonado[1], to the latter of whom, Mr. Calhoun, at an earlier stage of the same negotiations, refers by name as the pioneer of Spanish enterprise, are to be ranked with Admiral Fonte’s account, in the class of Mythical discoveries.

In regard to Vancouver, the author, it is hoped, will be pardoned for expressing an opinion, that Mr. Greenhow has permitted his admitted jealousy for the fame of his fellow-citizens to lead him to do injustice to Vancouver’s character, and to assail it with arguments founded in one or two instances upon incorrect views of Vancouver’s own statements. Mr. Gallatin expressed a very different opinion of this officer, in his Counter-statement, during the negotiation of 1826, when he observes that Vancouver “had too much probity to alter his statement, when, on the ensuing day, he was informed by Captain Gray of the existence of the river, at the mouth of which he had been for several days without being able to enter it.”

The chapter on the Convention of the Escurial is intended to give an outline of the facts and negotiations connected with the controversy between Spain and Great Britain in respect to Nootka Sound, and the subsequent settlement of the points in dispute. The arguments which the author conceived them to furnish against the positions of the Commissioners of the United States, have been inserted, as the opportunity offered itself, in the chapters on the several negotiations. The author, however, has introduced in this chapter, what appears to him to be a conclusive refutation of Mr. Buchanan’s statement, “that no sufficient evidence has been adduced that either Nootka Sound, or any other spot on the coast, was ever actually surrendered by Spain to Great Britain.”

The chapter on the Columbia River attempts to adjust the respective claims of Heceta, Gray, and Broughton, to the discovery and exploration of that river.

A few chapters have been next inserted on points of international law connected with territorial title, which, it was thought, might facilitate the examination of the questions raised in the course of the negotiations by the Commissioners of Great Britain and the United States. They do not profess to be complete, but they embrace, it is believed, nearly all that is of importance for the reader to be familiar with.

The chapters on the Limits of Louisiana, and the Treaty of Washington, were required to elucidate the “derivative title” of the United States.

If the author could have anticipated the publication of the correspondence between Mr. Pakenham and the Plenipotentiaries of the United States, he would most probably have adopted a different arrangement in his review of the several negotiations, so as to avoid an appearance of needless repetition. His manuscript, however, with the exception of the two last chapters, was completed before the President’s message reached this country. As the earlier sheets, however, were passing through the press, one or two remarks have been inserted which have a bearing on the recent correspondence; but it should be observed, that a separate review of each negotiation was designedly adopted, for the purpose of enabling the reader to appreciate more readily the variety of phases, which the claims of the United States have assumed in the course of them.

Some observations have been made in Chapter XII. and other places, upon the general futility of the argument from maps in the case of disputed territory. The late negotiations at Washington have furnished an apposite illustration of the truth of the author’s remarks. Mr. Buchanan, towards the conclusion of his last letter to Mr. Pakenham, addressed an argument to the British Minister, of the kind known to logicians as the argumentum ad verecundiam:—“Even British geographers have not doubted our title to the territory in dispute. There is a large and splendid globe now in the Department of the State, recently received from London, and published by Maltby & Co., manufacturers and publishers to ‘The Society for the Diffusion of Useful knowledge,’ which assigns this territory to the United States.” The history, however, of this globe is rather curious. It was ordered of Mr. Malby (not Maltby) for the Department of State at Washington, before Mr. Everett quitted his post of Minister of the United States in this country. It no doubt deserves the commendation bestowed upon it by Mr. Buchanan, for Mr. Malby manufactures excellent globes; but the globe sent to Washington was not made from the plates used on the globes published under the sanction of “The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” though this is not said by way of disparagement to it. The Society, in its maps, has carried the boundary line west of the Rocky Mountains, along the 49th parallel to the Columbia River, and thence along that river to the sea; but in its globes the line is not marked beyond the Rocky Mountains. Mr. Malby, knowing that the globe ordered of him was intended for the Department of State at Washington, was led to suppose that it would be more satisfactorily completed, as it was an American order, if he coloured in, for it is not engraved, the boundary line proposed by the Commissioners of the United States. The author would apologise for discussing so trifling a circumstance, had not the authorities of the United States considered the fact of sufficient importance to ground a serious argument upon it.

In conclusion, the Author must beg pardon of the distinguished diplomatists in the late negotiations at Washington, whose arguments he has subjected to criticism, if he has omitted to notice several portions of their statements, to which they may justly attribute great weight. It is not from any want of respect that he has neglected them, but the limits of his work precluded a fuller consideration of the subject.

London, Jan. 22, 1846.

CONTENTS.

THE OREGON QUESTION.

CHAPTER I.

THE OREGON TERRITORY.

North-west America.—Plateau of Anahuac.—Rocky Mountains.—New-Albion.—New Caledonia.—Oregon, or Oregan, the River of the West.—The Columbia River.—Extent of the Oregon Territory.—The Country of the Columbia.—Opening of the Fur Trade in 1786.—Vancouver.—Straits of Anian.—Straits of Juan de Fuca.—Barclay.—Meares.—The American sloop Washington.—Galiano and Valdés.—Journey of Mackenzie in 1793.—The Tacoutche-Tesse, now Frazer’s River.—North-west Company in 1805.—The Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670.—The First Settlement of the North-west Company across the Rocky Mountains in 1806, at Frazer’s Lake.—Journey of Mr. Thomson, the Astronomer of the North-west Company, down the North Branch of the Columbia River, in 1811.—Expedition of Lewis and Clarke, in 1805.—The Missouri Fur Company, in 1808.—Their First Settlement on the West of the Rocky Mountains.—The Pacific Fur Company, in 1810.—John Jacob Astor, the Representative of it.—Astoria, established in 1811.—Dissolution of the Pacific Fur Company, in July, 1813.—Transfer of Astoria to the North-west Company, by Purchase, in October, 1813.—Subsequent Arrival of the British Sloop-of-War, the Racoon.—Name of Astoria changed to Fort George.

North-Western America is divided from the other portions of the continent by a chain of lofty mountains, which extend throughout its entire length in a north-westerly direction, in continuation of the Mexican Andes, to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The southern part of this chain, immediately below the parallel of 42° north latitude, is known to the Spaniards by the name of the Sierra Verde, and the central ridge, in continuation of this, as the Sierra de las Grullas; and by these names they are distinguished by Humboldt in his account of New Spain, (Essai Politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne, l. i., c. 3,) as well as in a copy of Mitchell’s Map of North America, published in 1834. Mr. Greenhow, in his History of Oregon and California, states that the Anahuac Mountains is “the appellation most commonly applied to this part of the dividing chain extending south of the 40th degree of latitude to Mexico,” but when and on what grounds that name has come to be so applied, he does not explain. Anahuac was the denomination before the Spanish conquest of that portion of America which lies between the 14th and 21st degrees of north latitude, whereas the Cordillera of the Mexican Andes takes the name of the Sierra Madre a little north of the parallel of 19°, and the Sierra Madre in its turn is connected with the Sierra de las Grullas by an intermediate range, commencing near the parallel of 30°, termed La Sierra de los Mimbres. The application, indeed, of the name Anahuac to the entire portion of the chain which lies south of 40°, may have originated with those writers who have confounded Anahuac with New Spain; but as the use of the word in this sense is incorrect, it hardly seems desirable to adopt an appellation which is calculated to produce confusion, whilst it perpetuates an error, especially as there appear to be no reasonable grounds for discarding the established Spanish names. The plateau of Anahuac, in the proper sense of the word, comprises the entire territory from the Isthmus of Panama to the 21st parallel of north latitude, so that the name of Anahuac Mountains would, with more propriety, be confined to the portion of the Cordillera south of 21°. If this view be correct, the name of the Sierra Verde may be continued for that portion of the central range which separates the head waters of the Rio Bravo del Norte, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, and forms the south-western boundary of Texas, from those of the Rio Colorado, (del Occidente,) which empties itself into the Gulf of California.

The Rocky Mountains, then, or, as they are frequently called, the Stony Mountains, will be the distinctive appellation of the portion of the great central chain which lies north of the parallel of 42°; and if a general term should be required for the entire chain to the south of this parallel, it may be convenient to speak of it as the Mexican Cordillera, since it is co-extensive with the present territory of the United States of Mexico, or else as the Mexican Andes, since the range is, both in a geographical and a geological point of view, a continuation of the South American Andes.

Between this great chain of mountains and the Pacific Ocean a most ample territory extends, which may be regarded as divided into three great districts. The most southerly of these, of which the northern boundary line was drawn along the parallel of 42°, by the Treaty of Washington in 1819, belong to the United States of Mexico. The most northerly, commencing at Behring’s Straits, and of which the extreme southern limit was fixed at the southernmost point of Prince of Wales’s Island in the parallel of 54° 40′ north, by treaties concluded between Russia and the United States of America in 1824, and between Russia and Great Britain in 1825, forms a part of the dominions of Russia; whilst the intermediate country is not as yet under the acknowledged sovereignty of any power.

To this intermediate territory different names have been assigned. To the portion of the coast between the parallels of 43° and 48°, the British have applied the name of New Albion, since the expedition of Sir Francis Drake in 1578-80, and the British Government, in the instructions furnished by the Lords of the Admiralty, in 1776, to Captain Cook, directed him “to proceed to the coast of New Albion, endeavouring to fall in with it in the latitude of 45°.” (Introduction to Captain Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 4to, 1784, vol. i., p. xxxii.) At a later period, Vancouver gave the name of New Georgia to the coast between 45° and 50°, and that of New Hanover to the coast between 50° and 54°; whilst to the entire country north of New Albion, between 48° and 56° 30′, from the Rocky Mountains to the sea, British traders have given the name of New Caledonia, ever since the North-west Company formed an establishment on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, in 1806. (Journal of D. W. Harmon, quoted by Mr. Greenhow, p. 291.) The Spanish government, on the other hand, in the course of the negotiations with the British government which ensued upon the seizure of the British vessels in Nootka Sound, and terminated in the Convention of the Escurial, in 1790, designated the entire territory as “the Coast of California, in the South Sea.” (Declaration of His Catholic Majesty, June 4th, transmitted to all the European Courts, in the Annual Register, 1790.) Of late it has been customary to speak of it as the Oregon territory, or the Columbia River territory, although some writers confine that term to the region watered by the Oregon, or Columbia River, and its tributaries.

The authority for the use of the word Oregon, or, more properly speaking, Oregan, has not been clearly ascertained, but the majority of writers agree in referring the introduction of the name to Carver’s Travels. Jonathan Carver, a native of Connecticut and a British subject, set out from Boston in 1766, soon after the transfer of Canada to Great Britain, on an expedition to the regions of the Upper Mississippi, with the ultimate purpose of ascertaining “the breadth of that vast continent, which extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, in its broadest part, between 43° and 46° of north latitude. Had I been able,” he says, “to accomplish this task, I intended to have proposed to government to establish a post in some of those parts, about the Straits of Anian, which having been discovered by Sir Francis Drake, of course belong to the English.” The account of his travels, from the introduction to which the above extract in his own words is quoted, was published in London in 1778. Carver did not succeed in penetrating to the Pacific Ocean, but he first made known, or at least established a belief in, the existence of a great river, termed apparently, by the nations in the interior, Oregon, or Oregan, the source of which he placed not far from the head waters of the River Missouri, “on the other side of the summit of the lands that divide the waters which run into the Gulf of Mexico from those which fall into the Pacific Ocean.” He was led to infer, from the account of the natives, that this “Great River of the West” emptied itself near the Straits of Anian, (Carver’s Travels, 3d edit., London, 1781, p. 542,) although it may be observed that the situation of the so-called Straits of Anian themselves was not at this time accurately fixed. Carver, however, was misled in this latter respect, but the description of the locality where he placed the source of the Oregon, seems to identify it either with the Flatbow or M’Gillivray’s River, or else, and perhaps more probably, with the Flathead or Clark’s River, each of which streams, after pursuing a north-western course from the base of the Rocky Mountains, unites with a great river coming from the north, which ultimately empties itself into the Pacific Ocean in latitude 46° 18′. The name of Oregon has consequently been perpetuated in this main river, as being really “the Great River of the West,” and by this name it is best known in Europe; but in the United States of America, it is now more frequently spoken of as the Columbia River, from the name of the American vessel, “The Columbia,” which first succeeded in passing the bar at its mouth in 1792. The native name, however, will not totally perish in the United States, for it has been embalmed in the beautiful verse of Bryant, whom the competent judgment of Mr. Washington Irving has pronounced to be amongst the most distinguished of American poets:—

“Take the wings
Of morning, and the Barcan desert pierce,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings.”

If we adopt the more extensive use of the term Oregon territory, as applied to the entire country intermediate between the dominions of Russia and Mexico respectively, its boundaries will be the Rocky Mountains on the east, the Pacific Ocean on the west, the parallel of 54° 40′ N. L. on the north, and that of 42° N. L. on the south. Its length will thus comprise 12 degrees 40 minutes of latitude, or about 760 geographical miles. Its breadth is not so easily determined, as the Rocky Mountains do not run parallel with the coast, but trend from south-east to north-west. The greatest breadth, however, appears to comprise about 14 degrees of longitude, and the least about 8 degrees; so that we may take 11 degrees, or 660 geographical miles, as the average breadth. The entire superficies would thus amount to 501,600 geographical square miles, equal to 663,366 English miles. If, on the other hand, we adopt the narrower use of the term, and accept the north-western limit which Mr. Greenhow, in his second edition of his History of Oregon and California, has marked out for “the country of the Columbia,” namely, the range of mountains which stretches north-eastward from the eastern extremity of the Straits of Fuca, about 400 miles, to the Rocky Mountains, separating the waters of the Columbia from those of Frazer’s river, it will still include, upon his authority, not less than 400,000 square miles in superficial extent, which is more than double that of France, and nearly half of all the states of the Federal Union. “Its southernmost points” in this limited extent “are in the same latitudes with Boston and with Florence; whilst its northernmost correspond with the northern extremities of Newfoundland, and with the southern shores of the Baltic Sea.”

Such are the geographical limits of the Oregon territory, in its widest and in its narrowest extent. The Indian hunter roamed throughout it, undisturbed by civilised man, till near the conclusion of the last century, when Captain James King, on his return from the expedition which proved so fatal to Captain Cook, made known the high prices which the furs of the sea otter commanded in the markets of China, and thereby attracted the attention of Europeans to it. The enterprise of British merchants was, in consequence of Captain King’s suggestion, directed to the opening of a fur trade between the native hunters along the north-west coast of America, and the Chinese, as early as 1786. The attempt of the Spaniards to suppress this trade by the seizure of the vessels engaged in it, in 1789, led to the dispute between the crowns of Spain and Great Britain, in respect of the claim to exclusive sovereignty asserted by the former power over the port of Nootka and the adjacent latitudes, which was brought to a close by the Convention of the Escurial in 1790.

The European merchants, however, who engaged in this lucrative branch of commerce, confined their visits to stations on the coasts, where the natives brought from the interior the produce of their hunting expeditions; and even in respect of the coast itself, very little accurate information was possessed by Europeans, before Vancouver’s survey. Vancouver, as is well known, was despatched in 1791 by the British government to superintend, on the part of Great Britain, the execution of the Convention of the Escurial, and he was at the same time instructed to survey the coast from 35° to 60°, with a view to ascertain in what parts civilised nations had made settlements, and likewise to determine whether or not any effective water communication, available for commercial purposes, existed in those parts between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The popular belief in the existence of a channel, termed the Straits of Anian, connecting the waters of the Pacific with those of the Atlantic Ocean, in about the 58th or 60th parallel of latitude, through which Gaspar de Cortereal, a Portuguese navigator, was reported to have sailed in 1500, had caused many voyages to be made along the coast on either side of North America during the 16th and 17th centuries, and the exaggerated accounts of the favourable results of these voyages had promoted the progress of geographical discovery by stimulating fresh expeditions. In the 17th century, a narrative was published by Purchas, in his “Pilgrims,” professing that a Greek pilot, commonly called Juan de Fuca, in the service of the Spaniards, had informed Michael Lock the elder, whilst he was sojourning at Venice in 1596, that he had discovered, in 1592, the outlet of the Straits of Anian, in the Pacific Ocean, between 47° and 48°, and had sailed through it into the North Sea. The attention of subsequent navigators was for a long time directed in vain to the rediscovery of this supposed passage. The Spanish expedition under Heceta, in 1775, and the British under Cook, in 1778, had both equally failed in discovering any corresponding inlet in the north-west coast, doubtless, amongst other reasons, because it had been placed by the author of the tale between the parallels of 47° and 48°, where no strait existed. In 1787, however, the mouth of a strait was descried a little further northward, between 48° and 49°, by Captain Barclay, of the Imperial Eagle, and the entrance was explored in the following year by Captain Meares, in the Felice, who perpetuated the memory of Michael Lock’s Greek pilot, by giving it the name of the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Meares, in his observations on a north-west passage, p. lvi., prefixed to his Voyage, published in 1790, states that the American merchant sloop the Washington, upon the knowledge which he communicated, penetrated the straits of Fuca in the autumn of 1789, “as far as the longitude of 237° east of Greenwich,” (123° west,) and came out into the Pacific through the passage north of Queen Charlotte’s Island. Vancouver’s attention was directed, in consequence of Captain Meares’ report, to the especial examination of this strait, and it was surveyed by him, with the rest of the coast, in a most complete and effectual manner. A Spanish expedition, under Galiano and Valdés, was engaged about the same time upon the same object, so that from this period, i. e., the concluding decade of the last century, the coast of Oregon may be considered to have been sufficiently well known.

The interior, however, of the country, had remained hitherto unexplored, and no white man seems ever to have crossed the Rocky Mountains prior to Alexander Mackenzie, in 1793. Having ascended the Unjigah, or Peace River, from the Athabasca Lake, on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, to one of its sources in 54° 24′, Mackenzie embarked upon a river flowing from the western base of the mountains, called, by the natives, Tacoutche-Tesse. This was generally supposed to be the northernmost branch of the Columbia river, till it was traced, in 1812, to the Gulf of Georgia, where it empties itself in 49° latitude, and was thenceforth named Frazer’s river. Mackenzie, having descended this river for about 250 miles, struck across the country westward, and reached the sea in 52° 20′, at an inlet which had been surveyed a short time before by Vancouver, and had been named by him Cascade Canal. This was the first expedition of civilised men through the country west of the Rocky Mountains. It did not lead to any immediate result in the way of settlement, though it paved the way by contributing, in conjunction with Vancouver’s survey, to confirm the conclusion at which Captain Cook had arrived, that the American continent extended, in an uninterrupted line, north-westward to Behring’s Straits.

The result of Mackenzie’s discoveries was to open a wide field to the westward for the enterprise of British merchants engaged in the fur trade; and thus we find a settlement in this extensive district made, not long after the publication of his voyage, by the agents of the North-west Company. This great association had been growing up since 1784, upon the wreck of the French Canadian fur trade, and gradually absorbed into itself all the minor companies. It did not, however, obtain its complete organisation till 1805, when it soon became a most formidable rival to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had been chartered as early as 1670, and had all but succeeded in monopolising the entire fur trade of North America, after the transfer of Canada to Great Britain. The Hudson’s Bay Company, with the characteristic security of a chartered company, had confined their posts to the shores of the ample territory which had been granted to them by the charter of Charles II., and left the task of procuring furs to the enterprise of the native hunters. The practice of the hunters was to suspend their chase during the summer months, when the fur is of inferior quality, and the animals rear their young, and to descend by the lakes and rivers of the interior to the established marts of the company, with the produce of the past winter’s campaign. The North-west Company adopted a totally different system. They dispatched their servants into the very recesses of the wilderness, to bargain with the native hunters at their homes. They established wintering partners in the interior of the country, to superintend the intercourse with the various tribes of Indians, and employed at one time not fewer than 2,000 voyageurs or boatmen. The natives being thus no longer called away from their pursuit of the beaver and other animals, by the necessity of resorting as heretofore to the factories of the Hudson’s Bay Company, continued on their hunting grounds during the whole year, and were tempted to kill the cub and full-grown animal alike, and thus to anticipate the supply of future years. As the nearer hunting grounds became exhausted, the North-west Company advanced their stations westwardly into regions previously unexplored, and, in 1806, they pushed forward a post across the Rocky Mountains, through the passage where the Peace River descends through a deep chasm in the chain, and formed a trading establishment on a lake now called Frazer’s Lake, situated in 54° N. L. “This,” according to Mr. Greenhow, “was the first settlement or post of any kind made by British subjects west of the Rocky Mountains.” It may be observed, likewise, that it was the first settlement made on the west of the Rocky Mountains, by civilised men. It is from this period, according to Mr. Harmon, who was a partner in the company, and the superintendent of its trade on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, that the name of New Caledonia had been used to designate the northern portion of the Oregon territory.

Other posts were soon afterwards formed amongst the Flathead and Kootanie tribes on the head waters or main branch of the Columbia; and Mr. David Thomson, the astronomer of the North-west Company, descended with a party to the mouth of the Columbia in 1811. Mr. Thomson’s mission, according to Mr. Greenhow, was expressly intended to anticipate the Pacific Fur Company in the occupation of a post at the mouth of the Columbia. Such, indeed, may have been the ultimate intention, but the survey of the banks of the river, and the establishment of posts along it, was no less the object of it. Mr. Thomson was highly competent to conduct such an expedition, as may be inferred from the fact that he had been employed in 1798 to determine the latitude of the northernmost source of the Mississippi, and had on that occasion shown the impossibility of drawing the boundary line between the United States of America and Canada, due west from the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi, as had been stipulated in the second article of the treaty of 1783. Mr. Thomson and his followers were, according to Mr. Greenhow, the first white persons who navigated the northern branch of the Columbia, or traversed any part of the country drained by it.

The United States of America had, in the mean time, not remained inattentive to their own future commercial interests in this quarter, as they had despatched from the southern side an exploring party across the Rocky Mountains, almost immediately after their purchase of Louisiana, in 1803. On this occasion, Mr. Jefferson, then President of the United States, commissioned Captains Lewis and Clarke “to explore the River Missouri and its principal branches to their sources, and then to seek and trace to its termination in the Pacific some stream, whether the Columbia, the Oregon, the Colorado, or any other, which might offer the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent for the purposes of commerce.” The party succeeded in passing the Rocky Mountains towards the end of September, 1805, and after following, by the advice of their native guides, the Kooskooskee River, which they reached in the latitude 43° 34′, to its junction with the principal southern tributary of the Great River of the West, they gave the name of Lewis to this tributary. Having in seven days afterwards reached the main stream, they traced it down to the Pacific Ocean, where it was found to empty itself, in latitude 46° 18′. They thus identified the Oregon, or Great River of the West of Carver, with the river to whose outlet Captain Gray had given the name of his vessel, the Columbia, in 1792; and having passed the winter amongst the Clatsop Indians, in an encampment on the south side of the river, not very far from its mouth, which they called Fort Clatsop, they commenced, with the approach of spring, the ascent of the Columbia on their return homeward. After reaching the Kooskooskee, they pursued a course eastward till they arrived at a stream, to which they gave the name of Clarke, as considering it to be the upper part of the main river, which they had previously called Clarke at its confluence with the Lewis. Here they separated, at about the 47th parallel of latitude. Captain Lewis then struck across the country, northwards, to the Rocky Mountains, and crossed them, so as to reach the head waters of the Maria River, which empties itself into the Missouri just below the Falls. Captain Clarke, on the other hand, followed the Clarke River towards its sources, in a southward direction, and then crossed through a gap in the Rocky Mountains, so as to descend the Yellowstone River to the Missouri. Both parties united once more on the banks of the Missouri, and arrived in safety at St. Louis in September, 1806.

The reports of this expedition seem to have first directed the attention of traders in the United States to the hunting grounds of Oregon. The Missouri Fur Company was formed in 1808, and Mr. Henry, one of its agents, established a trading post on a branch of the Lewis River, the great southern arm of the Columbia. This seems to have been the earliest establishment of any kind made by citizens of the United States west of the Rocky Mountains. The hostility, however, of the natives, combined with the difficulty of procuring supplies, obliged Mr. Henry to abandon it in 1810. The Pacific Fur Company was formed about this time at New-York, with the object of monopolising, if possible, the commerce in furs between China and the north-west coast of America. The head of this association was John Jacob Astor, a native of Heidelberg, who had emigrated to the United States, and had there amassed very considerable wealth by extensive speculations in the fur trade. He had already obtained a charter from the Legislature of New-York in 1809, incorporating a company, under the name of the American Fur Company, to compete with the Mackinaw Company of Canada, within the Atlantic States, of which he was himself the real representative, according to his biographer, Mr. Washington Irving, his board of directors being merely a nominal body. In a similar manner, Mr. Astor himself writes to Mr. Adams in 1823, (Letter from J. J. Astor, of New-York, to the Hon. J. Q. Adams, Secretary of State of the United States, amongst the proofs and illustrations in the appendix to Mr. Greenhow’s work,) “You will observe that the name of the Pacific Fur Company is made use of at the commencement of the arrangements for this undertaking. I preferred to have it appear as the business of a company rather than of an individual, and several of the gentlemen engaged, Mr. Hunt, Mr. Crooks, Mr. M’Kay, M’Dougal, Stuart, &c., were in effect to be interested as partners in the undertaking, so far as respected the profit which might arise, but the means were furnished by me, and the property was solely mine, and I sustained the loss.” Mr. Astor engaged, on this understanding, nine partners in his scheme, of whom six were Scotchmen, who had all been in the service of the North-west Company, and three were citizens of the United States. He himself had become naturalised in the United States, but of his Scotch partners the three at least who first joined him seem to have had no intention of laying aside their national character, as, previously to signing, in 1810, the articles of agreement with Mr. Astor, they obtained from Mr. Jackson, the British Minister at Washington, an assurance that “in case of a war between the two nations, they would be respected as British subjects and merchants.”

Mr. Astor, having at last arranged his plans, despatched in September, 1810, four of his partners, with twenty-seven subordinate officers and servants, all British subjects, in the ship Tonquin, commanded by Jonathan Thorne, a lieutenant in the United States navy, to establish a settlement at the mouth of the Columbia river. They arrived at their destination in March, 1811, and erected in a short time a factory or fort on the south side of the river, about ten miles from the mouth, to which the name of Astoria was given. The Tonquin proceeded in June on a trading voyage to the northward, and was destroyed with her crew by the Indians in the Bay of Clyoquot, near the entrance of the Strait of Fuca.

In the following month of July, Mr. Thomson, the agent of the North-west Company, to whom allusion has already been made, descended the northern branch of the Columbia, and visited the settlement at the mouth of the Columbia. He was received with friendly hospitality by his old companion, Mr. M’Dougal, who was the superintendent, and shortly took his departure again, Mr. Stuart, one of the partners, accompanying him up the river as far as its junction with the Okinagan, where he remained during the winter, collecting furs from the natives. The factory at Astoria, in the mean time, was reinforced in January, 1812, by a further detachment of persons in the service of the Pacific Fur Company, who had set out overland early in 1811, and after suffering extreme hardships, and losing several of their number, at last made their way, in separate parties, to the mouth of the Columbia. A third detachment was brought by the ship Beaver, in the following May. All the partners of the Company, exclusive of Mr. Astor, had now been despatched to the scene of their future trading operations. Mr. Mackay, who had accompanied Mackenzie in his expedition to the Pacific in 1793, was alone wanting to their number: he had unfortunately proceeded northwards with Captain Thorne, in order to make arrangements with the Russians, and was involved in the common fate of the crew of the Tonquin.

The circumstances, however, of this establishment underwent a great change upon the declaration of war by the United States against Great Britain in June, 1812. Tidings of this event reached the factory in January, 1813. In the mean time Mr. Hunt, the chief agent of the Company, had sailed from Astoria, in the ship Beaver, in August, 1812, to make arrangements for the trade along the northern coast; whilst Mr. M’Dougal, the senior partner, with Mr. Mackenzie and others, superintended the factory. They were soon informed of the success of the British arms, and of the blockade of the ports of the United States, by Messrs. M’Tavish and Laroque, partners of the North-west Company, who visited Astoria early in 1813, with a small detachment of persons in the employment of that company, and opened negotiations with M’Dougal and Mackenzie for the dissolution of the Pacific Fur Company, and the abandonment of the establishment at Astoria. The association was in consequence formally dissolved in July, 1813; and on the 16th of October following, an agreement was executed between Messrs. M’Tavish and John Stuart, on the part of the North-west Company, and Messrs. M’Dougal, Mackenzie, David Stuart, and Clarke, on the part of the Pacific Fur Company, by which all the establishments, furs, and stock in hand of the late Pacific Fur Company were transferred to the North-west Company, at a given valuation, which produced, according to Mr. Greenhow, a sum total of 58,000 dollars. It may be observed, that four partners only of the Pacific Fur Company appear to have been parties to this agreement; but they constituted the entire body which remained at Astoria, Mr. Hunt, being absent, as already stated, and Messrs Crooks, Maclellan, and R. Stuart, having returned over-land to New-York in the spring of 1813.

The bargain had hardly been concluded when the British sloop of war, the Racoon, under the command of Capt. Black, entered the Columbia river, with the express purpose of destroying the settlement at Astoria; but the establishment had previously become the property of the North-west Company, and was in the hands of their agents. All that remained for Captain Black to perform, was to hoist the British ensign over the factory, the name of which he changed to Fort George.

Mr. M’Dougal and the majority of the persons who had been employed by the Pacific Fur Company, passed into the service of the North-west Company; and the agents of the latter body, with the aid of supplies from England, which arrived in 1814, were enabled to extend the field of their operations, and to establish themselves firmly in the country, undisturbed by any rivals.

CHAPTER II.

ON THE DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA.

Voyage of Francisco de Ulloa, in 1539.—Cabrillo, in 1542.—Drake, in 1577-80.—The Famous Voyage.—The World Encompassed.—Nuño da Silva.—Edward Cliffe.—Francis Pretty, not the Author of the Famous Voyage.—Fleurieu.—Pretty the Author of the Voyage of Cavendish.—Purchas’ Pilgrims.—Notes of Fletcher.—World Encompassed, published in 1628.—Mr. Greenhow’s Mistake in respect to the World Encompassed and the Famous Voyage.—Agreement between the World Encompassed and the Narrative of Da Silva.—Fletcher’s Manuscript in the Sloane Collection of the British Museum.—Furthest Limit southward of Drake’s Voyage.—Northern Limit 43° and upwards by the Famous Voyage, 48° by the World Encompassed.—The latter confirmed by Stow, the Annalist, in 1592, and by John Davis, the Navigator, in 1595, and by Sir W. Monson in his Naval Tracts.—Camden’s Life of Elizabeth.—Dr. Johnson’s Life of Sir F. Drake.—Fleurieu’s Introduction to Marchand’s Voyage.—Introduction to the Voyage of Galiano and Valdés.—Alexander von Humboldt’s New Spain.

The Spaniards justly lay claim to the discovery of a considerable portion of the north-west coast of America. An expedition from Acapulco under Francisco de Ulloa, in 1539, first determined California to be a peninsula, by exploring the Gulf of California from La Paz to its northern extremity. The chart, which Domingo del Castillo, the pilot of Ulloa, drew up as the result of this voyage, differs very slightly, according to Alexander von Humboldt, from those of the present day. Ulloa subsequently explored the western coast of California. Of the extent of his discoveries on this occasion there are contradictory accounts, but the extreme limit assigned to them does not reach further north than Cape Engaño, in 30° north latitude.

In the spring of the following year, 1542, two vessels were despatched under Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo from the port of Navidad. He examined the coast of California, as far north as 37° 10′, when he was driven back by a storm to the island of San Bernardo, in 34°, where he died. His pilot, Bartolemé Ferrelo, continued his course northwards after the death of his commander. The most northern point of land mentioned in the accounts of the expedition which have been preserved, was Cabo de Fortunas, placed by Ferrelo in 41°, which is supposed by Mr. Greenhow to have been the headland in 40° 20′, to which the name of C. Mendocino was given, in honor of the viceroy, Mendoza. Other authors, however, whose opinion is entitled to consideration, maintain that Ferrelo discovered Cape Blanco in 43°, to which Vancouver subsequently gave the name of Cape Orford. (Humboldt, Essai Politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne, l. iii., c. viii. Introduccion al Relacion del Viage hecho por las Goletas Sutil y Mexicana en el año de 1792.)

The Bull of Pope Alexander VI., as is well known, gave to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain all the New World to the westward of a meridian line drawn a hundred leagues west of the Azores. When England, however, shook off the yoke of the Papacy, she refused to admit the validity of Spanish titles when based only on such concessions. Elizabeth, for instance, expressly refused to acknowledge “any title in the Spaniards by donation of the Bishop of Rome, to places of which they were not in actual possession, and she did not understand why, therefore, either her subjects, or those of any other European prince, should be debarred from traffic in the Indies.” In accordance with such a policy, Sir Francis Drake obtained, through the interest of Sir Christopher Hatton, the vice-chamberlain of the Queen, her approval of an expedition projected by him into the South Sea. He set sail from Plymouth in 1577, passed through the Straits of Magellan in the autumn of 1578, and ravaged the coast of Mexico in the spring of 1579. Being justly apprehensive that the Spaniards would intercept him if he should attempt to re-pass Magellan’s Straits with his rich booty, and being likewise reluctant to encounter again the dangers of that channel, he determined to attempt the discovery of a north-east passage from the South Sea into the Atlantic, by the reported Straits of Anian.

There are two accounts, professedly complete, of Drake’s Voyage. The earliest of these first occurs in Hakluyt’s Collection of Voyages, published in 1589, and is entitled “The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea, and there-hence about the whole Globe of the Earth, begun in the yeere of our Lord, 1577.” It was re-published, by Hakluyt, with some alterations, in his subsequent edition of 1598-1600, and may be most readily referred to in the fourth volume of the reprint of this latter edition, published in 1811. The other account is intitled “The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, collected out of the notes of Mr. Francis Fletcher, Preacher in this employment, and compared with divers others’ notes that went in the same Voyage.” This work was first published in 1628, by Nicholas Bourne, and “sold at his shop at the Royal Exchange.” It appears to have been compiled by Francis Drake, the nephew of the circumnavigator, as a dedication “to the truly noble Robert Earl of Warwick” is prefixed, with his name attached to it. It will be found most readily in the second volume of the Harleian collection of voyages. There are also to be found in Hakluyt’s fourth volume, two independent, but unfortunately imperfect, narratives, one by Nuño da Silva, the Portuguese pilot, who was pressed by Sir F. Drake into his service at St. Jago, one of the Cape Verde islands, and discharged at Guatulco, where his account terminates; the other by Edward Cliffe, a mariner on board the ship Elizabeth, commanded by Mr. John Winter, one of Drake’s squadron, which parted company from him on the west coast of South America, immediately after passing through the Straits of Magellan. The Elizabeth succeeded in re-passing the straits, and arrived safe at Ilfracombe on June 2d, 1579; and Mr. Cliffe’s narrative, being confined to the voyage of his own ship, is consequently the least complete of all, in respect to Drake’s adventures.

It is a disputed point, whether Drake, in his attempt to find a passage to the Atlantic, by the north of California, reached the latitude of 48° or 43°. The Famous Voyage, is the account, on which the advocates for the lower latitude of 43° rely. The World Encompassed, supported by Stow the annalist, and two independent naval authorities, cotemporaries of Sir F. Drake, is quoted in favour of the higher latitude of 48°. Before examining the interval evidence of the two accounts, it may be as well to consider the authority which is due to them from external circumstances, as Mr. Greenhow’s account of the two works is calculated to mislead the judgment of the reader in this respect.

Mr. Greenhow, (p. 73,) in referring to the Famous Voyage, says that it was “written by Francis Pretty, one of the crew of Drake’s vessel, at the request of Hakluyt, and published by him in 1589. It is a plain and succinct account of what the writer saw, or believed to have occurred during the voyage, and bears all the marks of truth and authenticity.”

This statement could not but excite some surprise, as the Famous Voyage has no author’s name attached to it, either in the first edition of 1589, or in any of the later editions of Hakluyt, the more so because Hakluyt himself, in his Address to the favorable reader, prefixed to the edition of 1589, leads us to suppose that he was himself the author of the work. “For the conclusion of all, the memorable voyage of Master Thomas Candish into the South Sea, and from thence about the Globe of the Earth doth satisfie me, and I doubt not but will fully content thee, which as in time it is later than that of Sir F. Drake, so in relation of the Philippines, Japan, China, and the isle of St. Helena, it is more particular and exact; and therefore the want of the first made by Sir Francis Drake will be the lesse; wherein I must confess to have taken more than ordinary paines, meaning to have inserted it in this worke; but being of late (contrary to my expectation,) seriously dealt withall, not to anticipate or prevent another man’s paines and charge in drawing all the services of that worthie knight into one volume, I have yielded unto those my friends which pressed me in the matter, referring the further knowledge of his proceedings to those intended discourses.”

Hakluyt, however, appears to have had the narrative privately printed, and, contrary to the intention which he entertained at the time when he wrote his preface, and compiled his table of contents, and the index of his first edition, in neither of which is there any reference to the Famous Voyage, he has inserted the Famous Voyage between pages 643 and 644, evidently as an interpolation. It is nowhere stated that any copy of this edition exists, in which this interpolation does not occur. It is alluded to by Lowndes in his Bibliographical Manual, vol. ii., p. 853, art. “Hakluyt.” It is printed apparently on the same kind of paper, with the same kind of ink, and in the same kind of type with the rest of the work, but the signatures at the bottom of the pages, by which term are meant the numbers which are placed on the sheets for the printer’s guidance, do not correspond with the general order of the signatures of the work. This fact, combined with the circumstance that the pages are not numbered, furnishes a strong presumption that it was printed subsequently to the rest of the work. On the other hand there is evidence that it was printed to bind up with the rest, from the circumstance that at the bottom of the last page the word “Instructions” is printed to correspond with the first word at the top of p. 644, being the title of the next treatise—“Instructions given by the Honorable the Lords of the Counsell to Edward Fenton, Esq. for the order to be observed in the voyage recommended to him for the East Indies, and Cathay, April 9, 1582.”

It can hardly be doubted that this account is the narrative about which Hakluyt himself “had taken more than ordinary paines.” Hakluyt, as is well known, was a student of Christ Church, Oxford, who like his imitator Purchas, was imbued with a strong natural bias towards geographical studies, and himself compiled many of the narratives which his collection contained.

This inference as to the authorship of the Famous Voyage, drawn from the allusion in Hakluyt’s preface to the work, will probably appear to many minds more justifiable, if the claim set up in behalf of Francis Pretty can be shown to be utterly without foundation. It may be as well, therefore, to dispose of this at once. What may have been Mr. Greenhow’s authority it would be difficult to say, though it may be conjectured, from another circumstance which will be stated below, that he has been misled by an incorrect article on Sir Francis Drake in the Biographie Universelle. M. Eyriés, the writer of this article, refers to Fleurieu as his authority. Fleurieu, however, who was a distinguished French hydrographer, and edited, in Paris, in the year VIII. (1800) a work intitled “Voyage autour du Monde, par Etienne Marchand,” with which he published some observations of his own, intitled “Recherches sur les terres de Drake,” enumerates briefly in the latter work the different accounts of Drake’s voyage, but he no where mentions the name of the author of the Famous Voyage. Fleurieu’s information, indeed, was not in every respect accurate, as he states that the edition of Hakluyt which contained the Famous Voyage “ne parut à Londres qu’en 1600.” What he says, however, of the author, is comprised in a short note to this effect:—“Le gentilhomme Picard, (employé sur l’escadre de Drake,) auteur de cette relation, en ayant remis une copie au Baron de St. Simon, Seigneur de Courtomer, celui-ci engagea François de Louvencourt, Seigneur de Vauchelles, à en faire un extrait en Français sous le titre de ‘le Voyage Curieux faict autour du Monde par François Drach, Amiral d’Angleterre,’ qui fut imprimé chez Gesselin, Paris, 1627, en 8vo.”

It might be supposed from this statement, that the work of M. de Louvencourt would disclose the name of the gentleman of Picardy, who had been the companion of Drake; but on referring to the edition just cited of the French translation, the only allusion to Drake’s companion which is to be found in the work, occurs in a few words forming part of the dedication to M. de St. Simon:—“Or, Monsieur, je le vous dédie, parceque c’est vous que m’aviez donné, m’ayant fait entendre, que vous l’aviez eu d’un de vos sujets de Courtomer, qui a fait le même voyage avec ce seigneur.” Nothing further can safely he inferred from this, than that M. de St. Simon received the English copy, which M. de Louvencourt made use of, from one of his vassals who had accompanied Drake in his expedition; but whether this Picard subject of the lord of Courtomer was the author of the narrative, does not appear from the meagre dedication, which seems to have been the basis upon which Fleurieu’s statement was founded.

Fleurieu refers to the Famous Voyage as printed in duodecimo, in London, in the year 1600. This edition, however, cannot be traced in the catalogue of the British Museum or the Bodleian Library, nor does Watt refer to it in his Bibliotheca Britannica: but Fleurieu may have had authority for his statement, though the size of the edition is at least suspicious. Even the French translation of 1627, of which there was an earlier edition in 1613, apparently unknown to Fleurieu, is in 8vo, and an English edition of the Famous Voyage, slightly modified, which was published in London in 1752, and may be found in the British Museum, is a very mean pamphlet, though in 8vo. The separate editions likewise of Drake’s other voyages which are to be met with in public libraries are in small quarto, so that there would be no argument from analogy in favor of an edition in 12mo. The fact, however, of its having disappeared, might perhaps be urged as a sign of the insignificance of the edition.

It is very immaterial, even if Fleurieu has hazarded a hasty statement in respect to there having been a separate edition of the Famous Voyage as early as 1600. Thus much, at least, is certain, that Fleurieu is incorrect in stating that the edition of Hakluyt, in which it was inserted, did not appear before 1600; for a careful comparison between the French translation, and the respective English editions of 1589 and 1600, furnishes conclusive evidence that M. de Louvencourt’s translation was made from the narrative in the edition of 1589. Two examples will suffice. The edition of 1589 gives 55⅓ degrees of southern latitude, and 42 degrees of northern latitude, as the extreme limits of Drake’s voyage towards the two poles, which the French translation follows; whilst the edition of 1600 gives 57⅓ degrees of southern latitude, and 43 degrees of northern latitude, as the southern and northern extremes. There can therefore be little doubt that the work, which M. de Louvencourt translated, was the narrative about which Hakluyt himself had taken no ordinary pains: and which he printed separately from his general collection of voyages, so that it might be circulated privately, though he incorporated it into the work after it was completed.

So far, indeed, are we from finding any good authority for attributing the authorship of the Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake to Francis Pretty, one of his crew, as unhesitatingly advanced by Mr. Greenhow, that, on the contrary there is the strongest negative evidence that it was not written by a person of that name, unless we are prepared to admit that there were two individuals of that name, the one a native of Picardy, and vassal of the Sieur de Courtomer, the other an English gentleman, “of Ey in Suffolke;” the one a companion of Drake, in his voyage round the world in 1577-80, the other a companion of Cavendish, in his voyage round the world in 1586-88; the one the author of the Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, the other the writer of the Admirable and Prosperous Voyage of the Worshipful Master Thomas Candish.

Hakluyt, in his edition of 1589, gave merely “The Worthy and Famous Voyage of Master Thomas Candishe, made round about the Globe of the Earth in the space of two yeeres, and lesse than two months, begon in the yeere 1586,” which is subscribed at the end, “written by N. H.;” but in his edition of 1600, he published a fuller and more complete narrative, entitled, “The Admirable and Prosperous Voyage of the Worshipfull Master Thomas Candish, of Frimley, in the Countie of Suffolke, Esquire, into the South Sea, and from thence round about the circumference of the whole earth; begun in the yeere of our Lord 1586, and finished 1588. Written by Master Francis Pretty, lately of Ey, in Suffolke, a gentleman employed in the same action.” The author, in the course of the narrative, styles himself Francis Pretie, and says that he was one of the crew of the “Hugh Gallant, a barke of 40 tunnes,” which, with the Desire, of 120, and the Content, of 60 tons, made up Cavendish’s small fleet. This Suffolk gentleman, for several reasons, could not be the same individual as the Picard vassal of the lord of Courtomer, nor is it probable that he ever formed part of the crew of Drake’s vessel in the Famous Voyage, as he no where alludes to the circumstance, when he speaks of places which Drake visited, nor even when he describes the hull of a small bark, pointed out to them by a Spaniard, whom they had lately taken on board, in the narrowest part of the Straits of Magellan, “which we judged to be a bark called the John Thomas.” Now it is contrary to all probability that the writer of this passage should have been one of Drake’s crew, for the vessel, whose hull was seen on this occasion, was the Marigold, a bark of 50 tons, which had formed one of Drake’s fleet of five vessels, and had been commanded by Captain John Thomas, which fact would have been known to one of Drake’s companions, who could never have committed so gross a blunder as to confound the name of the ship with the name of the captain. That the circumstances of the loss of the Marigold made no slight impression upon the minds of Drake’s companions, is shown from its being alluded to in all the narratives of Nuño da Silva, Cliffe, and Fletcher, without exception.

Drake had succeeded in passing the Straits of Magellan with three of his vessels: the Golden Hind, his own ship; the Elizabeth, commanded by Captain Winter; and the Marigold, by Captain Thomas. On the 30th of September, 1578, the Marigold parted from them in a gale of wind, and was wrecked in the Straits. On the 7th of October the Elizabeth likewise parted company from the Admiral; she, however, succeeded in making her way back through the Straits, and arrived safe at Ilfracombe on the 7th of June, 1579. It is singular that, in all the three accounts, which are known to be written by companions of Drake, the separation of the Marigold, as well as of the Elizabeth, is alluded to; whereas, in the Famous Voyage, there is no allusion to the loss of the Marigold, but only to the separation of the Elizabeth, whose safe arrival in England made the fact notorious. If Hakluyt wrote the Famous Voyage, the general notoriety of the separate return of the Elizabeth would account for his not overlooking that circumstance, whilst he omitted all allusion to the Marigold, about which his information would be comparatively imperfect. If one of Drake’s own crew was the author, it is difficult to suppose that he would have carefully alluded to “their losing sight of their consort, in which Mr. Winter was,” who did not perish, and should omit all mention of the loss of the Marigold, which is spoken of in the World Encompassed “as the sorrowful separation of the Marigold from us, in which was Captain John Thomas, with many others of our dear friends.”

The course of this inquiry seems to justify the following conclusions: that the “Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake” is, strictly speaking, an anonymous work; that it is very improbable that it was compiled by one of Drake’s crew; on the contrary, Hakluyt’s own preface to his edition of 1589, seems to warrant us in supposing that he had himself been employed in preparing the narrative, which he printed separately from the rest of his work, but subsequently inserted into it. Hakluyt had most probably procured information from original sources, but he had certainly not access, in 1589, to what he subsequently considered to be more trustworthy sources, for he made various alterations in his narrative, in his edition of 1600. There is assuredly not the slightest ground for attributing it to Francis Pretty; and if M. Eyriés was the originator of this mistake, he must undoubtedly have confounded the Famous Voyage of Drake with the Famous Voyage of Candish. All that can be inferred from M. de Louvencourt’s dedication of his French translation to M. de St. Simon is, that the Lord of Courtomer had received the English original from one of his vassals, who had sailed with Drake; but the most ingenious interpretation of his words will not warrant us in inferring that the donor was likewise the author of the work.

It may be not unworthy of remark, that Purchas, in the fifth volume of his Pilgrims, (p. 1181,) gives a list of persons known to the world as the companions of Drake, in which the name of Francis Pretty is not found. “Men noted to have compassed the world with Drake, which have come to my hands, are Thomas Drake, brother to Sir Francis, Thomas Hood, Thomas Blaccoler, John Grippe, George, a musician, Crane, Fletcher, Cary, Moore, John Drake, John Thomas, Robert Winterly, Oliver, the gunner, &c.” It would be a reflection upon the well-known pains-taking research of Purchas, to suppose that he would have omitted from his list the name of the author of the Famous Voyage, had he been really one of Drake’s crew.

The other narrative, which is far more full and complete than the Famous Voyage, is entitled the “World Encompassed.” It was published under the superintendence of Francis Drake, a nephew of the Admiral, if not compiled by him; the foundation of it, as stated in the title, seems to have been the notes of Francis Fletcher, the chaplain of Drake’s vessel, “compared with divers others’ notes that went in the same voyage.” Fleurieu, in speaking of this work, says: “Celleci est le récit d’un témoin oculaire: et la fonction qu’il remplissait à bord du vaisseau amiral pourrait faire présumer que, s’il n’était pas l’homme de la flotte le plus expérimenté dans l’art de la navigation, du moins il devait être celui que les études exigées de sa profession avaient mis le plus à portée d’acquérir quelques connaissances, et qui pouvait le mieux exprimer ce qu’il avait vu.” (Recherches sur les terres australes de Drake, p. 227.)

Fleurieu, in further illustration of the probable fitness of Fletcher for his task, refers to the excellent account of Anson’s Voyages, written by his chaplain, R. Walter, and to the valuable treatise on naval evolutions, compiled by the Jesuit Paul Hoste, the chaplain of Tourville.

The earliest edition of “The World Encompassed” appeared in 1628, and a copy of this date is to be found in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford. It was printed for Nicholas Bourne, as “the next voyage to that to Nombre de Dios, in 1572, formerly imprinted.” A second edition was printed in 1635, and is in the King’s Library at the British Museum. A third edition was published in 1652, and may be found in the Library of the British Museum. It was therefore impossible not to feel surprise at Mr. Greenhow’s deliberately stating, that this work was not published before 1652, the more so as Watt, in his Bibliotheca Britannica, refers to the first edition of 1628. It is the coincidence of this second error, which warrants the supposition that Mr. Greenhow has placed too implicit a faith in the writer of the article upon Drake, in the Biographie Universelle. M. Eyriés, the author of that article, there writes, “Un autre ouvrage original est celui qui fut composé sur les mémoires de Francis Fletcher, chapelain sur le vaisseau de Drake. Ces mémoires furent comparés et fondus avec ceux de plusieurs autres personnes qui avaient été employées dans la même expédition; le résultat de ce travail parut sous ce titre: The World Encompassed, by Sir F. Drake, collected out of the notes of Master F. F., preacher in this employment, and others. Londres, 1652, 8vo.” There is another slight error in this statement, as the work is a small 4to, not an 8vo.

It has been deemed the more necessary to point out carefully the errors of Mr. Greenhow, in regard to these two narratives, because he contrasts them expressly (p. 74) as “the one proceeding entirely from a person who had accompanied Drake in his expedition, and published in 1589, during the life of the hero; the other compiled from various accounts, and not given to the world until the middle of the following century.”

In respect to the narrative of the World Encompassed, Mr. Greenhow thus expresses himself:—“It is a long and diffuse account, filled with dull and generally absurd speculations, and containing moreover a number of statements, which are positive and evidently wilful falsehoods; yet it contains scarcely a single fact not related in the Famous Voyage, from which many sentences and paragraphs are taken verbatim, while others convey the same meaning in different terms. The journal, or supposed journal of Fletcher’s, remains in manuscript in the British Museum: and from it were derived the false statements above mentioned, according to Barrow, who consulted it.”

Mr. Greenhow’s opinion of the length and diffuseness of the narrative, and of the dulness and general absurdity of the speculations, will probably be acquiesced in by those who have read the World Encompassed, but the rest of his observations have been made at random. The World Encompassed does not profess to be an original work, but to be a compilation from the notes of several who went the voyage. It is therefore highly probable that the compiler had before him “The Famous Voyage” amongst other narratives, and we should be prepared to find many statements alike in the two accounts. But it seems hard to suppose with Mr. Greenhow, that, where the World Encompassed differs from the Famous Voyage, the statements are “positive and evidently wilful falsehoods.” There are several statements, for instance, where the two narratives differ, and where the World Encompassed agrees with Nuño da Silva’s account, or with Cliffe’s narrative.

For instance, on the second day after clearing the Straits of Magellan, on Sept. 7th, a violent gale came on from the northeast, which drove Drake’s three vessels, the Golden Hind, the Elizabeth, and the Marigold to the height of 57° south according to Cliffe, and about 200 leagues in longitude west of the strait, according to the Famous Voyage. They could make no head against the gale for three weeks, and during that interval there was an eclipse of the moon, which is alluded to in all the narratives. According to Nuño da Silva, they lay driving about, without venturing to hoist a sail till the last day of September, and about this time lost sight of the Marigold. The Elizabeth still kept company with the Golden Hind, but on or before October 7th, Drake’s vessel parted from her consort. We now come to a very important event in Drake’s voyage, which would seem to be one of the supposed “positive and evidently wilful falsehoods,” to which Mr. Greenhow alludes.

The Famous Voyage conducts Sir F. Drake in a continuous course north-westward, after losing sight of the Elizabeth, to the island of Mocha, in 38° 30′ south, whereas the World Encompassed says, that “Drake, being driven from the Bay of the Parting of Friends out into the open sea, was carried back again to the southward into 55° south, on which height they found shelter for two days amongst the islands, but were again driven further to the southward, and at length fell in with the uttermost part of land towards the South Pole,” in about 56° south. Here Fletcher himself landed, and travelled to the southernmost part of the island, beyond which there was neither continent nor island, but one wide ocean. We altered the name, says Fletcher in his MS. journal, from Terra Incognita, to Terra nunc bene Cognita. Now this account in the World Encompassed, varying so totally from that in the Famous Voyage, is fully borne out by the positive evidence of Nuño da Silva, who says, that after losing sight of another ship of their company, the Admiral’s ship being now left alone, with this foul weather they ran till they were under 57°, where they entered into the haven of an island, and stayed there three or four days. The Famous Voyage would lead the reader to suppose, that after leaving the Bay of Severing of Friends, the Elizabeth and Golden Hind were driven in company to 57° 20′ south; but it is altogether contrary to probability that Cliffe should have omitted the fact of the Elizabeth having been in company with Drake when he discovered the southernmost point of land, had such been the case. The author of the Famous Voyage has evidently mixed up the events of the gale in the month of September with those of the storm after the 8th of October. This is a very striking instance of the truth of Captain W. Burney’s remark, “that the author of the Famous Voyage seems purposely, on some occasions, to introduce confusion as a cloak for ignorance.”

Again, the World Encompassed mentions that Drake was badly wounded in the face with an arrow by the natives in the island of Mocha, about which the Famous Voyage is altogether silent, but Nuño da Silva confirms this statement. Other instances might be cited to the like purport.

Mr. Greenhow, at the end of his note already cited, says, “The journal, or supposed journal of Fletcher, remains in MS. in the British Museum, and from it were derived the false statements above mentioned, according to Barrow, who consulted it.” Mr. Greenhow has nowhere particularised what these false statements are, unless he means that the statements are false which are at variance with the Famous Voyage. It is evident, however, that such a view assumes the whole point at issue between the two narratives to be decided upon internal evidence in favour of the Famous Voyage, which a careful examination of the two accounts will not justify.

But it is incorrect to refer to Fletcher’s journal, as the source of the assumed false statements in the World Encompassed. The manuscript to which Captain James Burney refers, in his Voyage of Sir Francis Drake round the world, as “the manuscript relation of Francis Fletcher, minister, in the British Museum,” forms a part of the Sloane Collection, in which there is likewise a manuscript of Drake’s previous expedition to Nombre de Dios. It is not, however, properly speaking, a MS. of Fletcher’s, but a MS. copy of Fletcher’s MS. It bears upon the fly-leaf the words, “e libris Joh. Conyers, Pharmacopolist,—Memorandum, Hakluyt’s Voyages of Fletcher.” Its title runs thus: “The First Part of the Second Voyage about the World, attempted, contrived, and happily accomplished, to wit, in the time of three years, by Mr. Francis Drake, at her Highness’s command, and his company: written and faithfully laid down by Ffrancis Ffletcher, Minister of Christ, and Presbyter of the Gospel, adventurer and traveller in the same voyage.” On the second page is a map of England, and above it these words: “This is a map of England, an exact copy of the original to a hair; that done by Mr. Ffrancis Ffletcher, in Queen Elizabeth’s time; it is copied by Jo. Conyers, citizen and apothecary of London, together with the rest, and by the same hand, as follows.”

The work appears to have been very carefully executed by Conyers, and is illustrated with rude maps and drawings of plants, boats, instruments of music and warfare, strange animals, such as the Vitulus marinus and others, which are referred to in the text of the MS., opposite to which they are generally depicted, and each is specially vouched to be a faithful copy of Fletcher’s MS.

There is no date assigned to Fletcher’s own MS., but we might fairly be warranted in referring it to a period almost immediately subsequent to the happy accomplishment of the voyage, from the leader of the company being spoken of as “Mr. Francis Drake.” The Golden Hind reached England in November, 1580, and Drake was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in April, 1581; there was then an interval of four months, during which the circumstances of his voyage and his conduct were under the consideration of the Queen’s Council, and Fletcher may have completed his journal before their favourable decision led to Drake’s receiving the honour of knighthood. On comparing the World Encompassed with this MS., it will be found that most of the speculations, discussions, and fine writing in the World Encompassed have emanated from the nephew of the hero, or whoever may have been the compiler of the work, and have not been derived from this MS., which is written in rather a sober style, and is much less diffuse than might reasonably be expected. Fletcher’s imagination seems certainly to have been much affected by the giant stature of the Patagonians, and by the terrible tempest which dispersed the fleet after it had cleared the Straits of Magellan. In respect to the Patagonians, Cliffe, it must be allowed, says, they were “of a mean stature, well limbed, and of a duskish tawnie or browne colour.” On the other hand, Nuño da Silva says, they were “a subtle, great, and well-formed people, and strong and high of stature.” Whichever of the two accounts be the more correct, this circumstance is certain, that four of the natives beat back six of Drake’s sailors, and slew with their arrows two of them, the one an Englishman, and the other a Netherlander, so that they could be no mean antagonists. In respect to the tempest, the events of it must have with reason fixed themselves deep into Fletcher’s memory, for he writes in his journal, “About which time the storm being so outrageous and furious, the barke Marigold, wherein Edward Bright, one of the accusers of Thomas Doughty, was captain, with 28 souls, was swallowed up, which chanced in the second watch of the night, wherein myself and John Brewer, our trumpeter, being watch, did hear their fearful cries continued without hope, &c.”

There is a greater discrepancy between the Famous Voyage and the World Encompassed, as to the furthest limit of Drake’s expedition to the north of the equator, than, as already shown, in regard to the southern limit. We have here, unfortunately, no independent narrative to appeal to in support of either statement, as the Portuguese pilot was dismissed by Drake at Guatulco, and did not accompany him further. Hakluyt himself does not follow the same version of the story in the two editions of his narrative. In the Famous Voyage, as interpolated in the edition of 1589, he gives 55⅓° south, as the furthest limit southward; but in the edition of 1600, he gives 57⅓°; in a similar manner we find 42° north, as the highest northern limit mentioned in the edition of 1589, whilst in that of 1600 it is extended to 43°. Hakluyt thus seems to have found that his earlier information was not to be implicitly relied upon, but we have no clew to the fresh sources to which he had at a later period found access. The World Encompassed, on the other hand, continues Drake’s course up to the 48th parallel of north latitude. The two narratives, however, do not appear to be altogether irreconcileable. In the Famous Voyage, as amended in the edition of 1600, we have this statement:—“We therefore set sail, and sayled (in longitude) 600 leagues at least for a good winde, and thus much we sayled from the 16 of April till the 3 of June. The 5 day of June, being in 43 degrees towards the pole arcticke, we found the ayre so colde that our men, being greevously pinched with the same, complained of the extremitie thereof, and the further we went, the more the cold increased upon us. Whereupon we thought it best for that time to seek the land, and did so, finding it not mountainous, but low plaine land, till we came within 38 degrees towards the line. In which height it pleased God to send us into a faire and good baye, with a good winde to enter the same.”

It will be seen from this account, that it was in the 43d, or, as in the earlier edition of 1589, the 42d parallel of north lat., that the cold was first felt so intensely by Drake’s crew, and that the further they went, the more the cold increased upon them; so that from the latter passage it may be inferred that they did not discontinue their course at once as soon as they reached the 43d parallel.

It appears, likewise, that Drake, from the nature of the wind, was obliged to gain a considerable offing, before he could stand towards the northward: 600 leagues in longitude, according to the first edition (the second edition omitting the words ‘in longitude,’) which does not differ much from the World Encompassed. The latter states—“From Guatulco, or Aquatulco, we departed the day following, viz., April 16, setting our course directly into the sea, whereupon we sailed 500 leagues in longitude to get a wind: and between that and June 3, 1400 leagues in all, till we came into 42 degrees of latitude, where the night following we found such an alternation of heat into extreme and nipping cold, that our men in general did grievously complain thereof.”

The cold seems to have increased to that extremity that, in sailing two degrees further north, the ropes and tackling of the ship were quite stiffened. The crew became much disheartened, but Drake encouraged them, so that they resolved to endure the uttermost. On the 5th of June they were forced by contrary winds to run into an ill-sheltered bay, where they were enveloped in thick fogs, and the cold becoming still more severe, “commanded them to the southward whether they would or no.” “From the height of 48 degrees, in which now we were, to 38, we found the land by coasting along it to be but low and reasonable plain: every hill, (whereof we saw many, but none very high,) though it were in June, and the sun in his nearest approach to them, being covered with snow. In 38° 30′ we fell in with a convenient and fit harbour, and June 17th came to anchor therein, where we continued until the 23d day of July following.”

The writer of this account, in another paragraph, confirms the above statement by saying, “add to this, that though we searched the coast diligently, even unto 48°, yet we found not the land to trend so much as one point in any place towards the East, but rather running on continually north-west, as if it went directly into Asia.”

Mr. Greenhow is disposed to reject the statement of the World Encompassed, for two reasons: first, because it is improbable that a vessel like Drake’s could have sailed through six degrees of latitude from the 3d to the 5th of June; secondly, because it is impossible that such intense cold could be experienced in that part of the Pacific in the month of June, as is implied by the circumstances narrated, and therefore they must be “direct falsehoods.”

The first objection has certainly some reason in it; but in rejecting the World Encompassed, Mr. Greenhow adopts the Famous Voyage as the true narrative, so that it becomes necessary to see whether Hakluyt’s account is not exposed to objections equally grave.

Hakluyt agrees with the author of the World Encompassed, in dating Drake’s arrival at a convenient harbour on June 17,—(Hakluyt gives this date in vol. iii., p. 524,)—so that Drake would have consumed twelve days in running back three and a half degrees, according to one version of the Famous Voyage, and four and a half degrees according to the other, before a wind which was so violent that he could not continue to beat against it. There is no doubt about the situation of the port where Drake took shelter, at least within half a degree, that it was either the Port de la Bodega, in 38° 28′, as some have with good reason supposed, (Maurelle’s Journal, p. 526, in Barrington’s Miscellanies,) or the Port de los Reyes, situated between La Bodega and Port San Francisco, in about 38°, as the Spaniards assert; and there is no difference in the two stories in respect to the interval which elapsed after Drake turned back, until he reached the port. There is, therefore, the improbability of Drake’s vessel, according to Hakluyt, making so little way in so long a time before a wind, to be set off against the improbability of its making, according to the World Encompassed, so much way in so short a time on a wind, the wind blowing undoubtedly all this time very violently from the north-west. Many persons may be disposed to think that the two improbabilities balance each other.

In respect to the intense cold, it must be remembered that the Famous Voyage, equally with the World Encompassed, refers to the great extremity of the cold as the cause of Drake’s drawing back again till he reached 38°. There can, therefore, be no doubt that Drake did turn back on account of his men being unable to bear up against the cold, after having so lately come out of the extreme heat of the tropics. Is it more probable that this intense cold should have been experienced in the higher or the lower latitude? for the intense cold must be admitted to be a fact. Drake seems to have been exposed to one of those severe winds termed Northers, which in the early part of the summer, bring down the atmosphere, even at New Orleans and Mexico, to the temperature of winter; but without seeking to account for the cold, as that would be foreign to the present inquiry, the fact, to whatever extent it be admitted, would rather support the statement that Drake reached the 48th parallel, than that he was constrained to turn back at the lower latitude of 43°.

It may likewise be observed that the description of the coast, “as trending continually north-westward, as if it went directly into Asia,” would correspond with the 48th parallel, but be altogether at variance with the 43d; and it is admitted by all, that Drake’s object was to discover a passage from the western to the eastern coast of North America. His therefore finding the land not to trend so much as one point to the east, but, on the contrary, to the westward, whilst it fully accounts for his changing his course, determines also where he decided to return. It should not be forgotten that the statement in the World Encompassed, that the coast trended to the westward in 48°, was in contradiction of the popular opinion regarding the supposed Straits of Anian, and if it were not the fact, the author hazarded, without an adequate object, the rejection of this part of his narrative, and unavoidably detracted from his own character for veracity.

We have, however, two cotemporaries of Sir Francis Drake, who confirm the statement of the World Encompassed. One of these has been strangely overlooked by Mr. Greenhow; namely, Stow the annalist, who, under the year 1580, gives an account of the return of Master Francis Drake to England, from his voyage round the world. “He passed,” he says, “forth northward, till he came to the latitude of forty-seven, thinking to have come that way home, but being constrained by fogs and cold winds to forsake his purpose, came backward to the line ward the tenth of June, 1579, and stayed in the latitude of thirty-eight, to grave and trim his ship, until the five-and-twenty of July.” This is evidently an account derived from sources quite distinct from those of either of the other two narratives. It occurs as early as 1592, in an edition of the Annals which is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, so that it was circulated two years at least before Drake’s death.

The other authority is that of one of the most celebrated navigators of Drake’s age, John Davis, of Sandrug by Dartmouth, who was the author of a work entitled “The World’s Hydrographical Discovery.” It was “imprinted at London, by Thomas Dawson, dwelling at the Three Cranes in the Vine-tree, in 1595,” and may be found most readily in the 4th volume of the last edition of Hakluyt’s Voyages. After giving some account of the dangers which Drake had surmounted in passing through the Straits of Magellan, which Davis had himself sailed through three times, he proceeds to say, that “after Sir Francis Drake was entered into the South Seas, he coasted all the western shores of America, until he came into the septentrional latitude of forty-eight degrees, being on the back side of Newfoundland.” Now Davis is certainly entitled to respectful attention, from his high character as a navigator. He had made three voyages in search of a north-west passage, and had given his name to Davis’ Straits, as the discoverer of them; he had likewise been the companion of Cavendish in his last voyage into the South Seas, in 1591-93, when, having separated from Cavendish, he discovered the Falkland islands. He was therefore highly competent to form a correct judgment of the value of the accounts which he had received respecting Drake’s voyage, nor was he likely, as a rival in the career of maritime discovery, to exaggerate the extent of it. We find him, on this occasion, deliberately adopting the account that Drake reached that portion of the north-west coast of America, which corresponded to Newfoundland on the north-east coast, or, as he distinctly says, the septentrional latitude of 48 degrees.

Davis, however, is not the only naval authority of that period who adopted this view, for Sir William Monson, who was admiral in the reign of Elizabeth and James I., and served in expeditions against the Spaniards under Drake, in his introduction to Sir Francis Drake’s voyage round the world, praises him because “lastly and principally that after so many miseries and extremities he endured, and almost two years spent in unpractised seas, when reason would have bid him sought home for his rest, he left his known course, and ventured upon an unknown sea in forty-eight degrees, which sea or passage we know had been often attempted by our seas, but never discovered.” And in his brief review of Sir F. Drake’s voyage round the world, he says: “From the 16th of April to the 5th of June he sailed without seeing land, and arrived in forty-eight degrees, thinking to find a passage into our seas, which land he named Albion.” (Sir W. Monson’s Naval Tracts, in Churchill’s Collection of Voyages, vol. iii., pp. 367, 368.)

Mr. Greenhow (p. 75) says, that Davis’s assertion carries with it its own refutation, “as it is nowhere else pretended that Drake saw any part of the west coast of America between the 17th degree of latitude and the 38th.” But surely Davis might use the expression, “coasted all the western shores of America,” without being supposed to pretend that Drake kept in sight of the coast all the way. The objection seems to be rather verbal than substantial. Again, Sir W. Monson is charged by the same author with inconsistency, because he speaks of C. Mendocino as the “furthest land discovered,” and the “furthermost known land.” But Sir W. Monson is on this occasion discussing the probable advantages of a north-west passage as a saving of distance, and he is speaking of C. Mendocino, as the “furthermost known part of America,” i. e., the furthermost headland from which a course might be measured to the Moluccas, and he is likewise referring especially to the voyage of Francisco Gali, so that this objection is more specious than solid. It should likewise not be forgotten, that in the most approved maps of that day, in the last edition of Ortelius, for example, and in that of Hondius, which is given in Purchas’s Pilgrims, C. Mendocino is the northernmost point of land of North America. It may also not be amiss to remark, that in the map which Mr. Hallam (in his Literature of Europe, vol. ii., c. viii., § v.) justly pronounces to be the best map of the sixteenth century, and which is one of uncommon rarity, Cabo Mendocino is the last headland marked upon the north-west coast of America, in about 43° north latitude. This map is found with a few copies of the edition of Hakluyt of 1589: in other copies, indeed, there is the usual inferior map, in which C. Mendocino is placed between 50° and 60°. The work, however, in which it has been examined for the present purpose, is Hakluyt’s edition of 1600, in which it is sometimes found with Sir F. Drake’s voyage traced out upon it: but in the copy in the Bodleian Library, no such voyage is observed; whilst the line of coast is continued above C. Mendocino and marked, in large letters, “Nova Albion.” Thus Hakluyt himself, in adopting this map as “a true hydrographical description of so much of the world as hath been hitherto discovered and is common to our knowledge,” has so far admitted that Nova Albion extended beyond the furthest land discovered by the Spaniards. On the other hand, Camden, in his life of Elizabeth, first published in 1615, adopts the version of the story which Hakluyt had put forth in his earliest edition of the Famous Voyage, making the southern limit 55° south, and the northern 42° north, which Hakluyt has himself rejected in his later edition. There can be little doubt that Camden’s account bears internal evidence of having been copied in the main from Hakluyt. Purchas, as we may gather from his work, merely followed Hakluyt.

In addition to these, Mr. Greenhow enumerates several comparatively recent authors as adopting Hakluyt’s opinion. Of these, perhaps Dr. Johnson has the greatest renown. He published a life of Drake in parts, in five numbers of the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1740-41. It was, however, amongst his earliest contributions, when he was little more than thirty years of age, and therefore is not entitled to all the weight which the opinion of Dr. Johnson at a later period of life might carry with it. But as it is, the passage, as it stands at present, seems to involve a clerical error. “From Guatulco, which lies in 15° 40′, they stood out to sea, and without approaching any land, sailed forward till on the night following the 3d of June, being then in the latitude of 38°, they were suddenly benumbed with such cold blasts that they were scarcely able to handle the ropes. This cold increased upon them, as they proceeded, to such a degree that the sailors were discouraged from mounting upon deck; nor were the effects of the climate to be imputed to the warmth of the regions to which they had been lately accustomed, for the ropes were stiff with frost, and the meat could scarcely be conveyed warm to the table. On June 17th they came to anchor in 38° 30′.”

In the original paper, as published in the Gentleman’s Magazine for January, 1741, Dr. Johnson writes 38° in numbers as the parallel of latitude where the cold was felt so acutely. This would be in a far lower latitude than what any of the accounts of Drake’s own time gives; so that it may for that reason alone be suspected to be an error of the press, more particularly as Drake is made ultimately to anchor in 38° 30′, a higher latitude than that in which his crew were benumbed with the cold. We must either suppose that Dr. Johnson entirely misunderstood the narrative, and intentionally represented Drake as continuing his voyage northward in spite of the cold, and anchoring in a higher latitude than where his men were so much discouraged by its severity, or that there is a typographical error in the figures. The latter seems to be the more probable alternative; and if, in order to correct this error, we may reasonably have recourse to the authority from which he derived his information as to the latitude of the port where Drake cast anchor, it is to the World Encompassed, and not to the Famous Voyage, that we must refer; for it is the World Encompassed which gives us 38° 30′ as the latitude of the convenient and fit harbour, whereas the Famous Voyage sends Drake into a fair and good bay in 38°.

The dispute between Spain and Great Britain respecting the fur trade on the north-west coast of America having awakened the attention of the European powers to the value of discoveries in that quarter, a French expedition was in consequence despatched in 1790, under Captain Etienne Marchand, who, after examining some parts of the north-west coast of America, concluded the circumnavigation of the globe in 1792. Fleurieu, the French hydrographer, published a full account of Marchand’s Voyage, to which he prefaced an introduction, read before the French Institute in July, 1797. In this introduction he reviews briefly the course of maritime discovery in these parts, and states his opinion, without any qualification, that Sir Francis Drake made the land on the north-west coast of America in the latitude of 48 degrees, which no Spanish navigator had yet reached. Mr. Greenhow (p. 223) speaks highly of Fleurieu’s work, though he considers him to have been careless in the examination of his authorities. He observes, that “his devotion to his own country, and his contempt for the Spaniards and their government, led him frequently to make assertions and observations at variance with truth and justice.” It may be added, that at the time when he composed his introduction, the relations of France and Great Britain were not of a kind to dispose him to favour unduly the claims of British navigators.

The same train of events which terminated in the Nootka Convention, led to a Spanish expedition under Galiano and Valdés, of which an account was published, by order of the king of Spain, at Madrid, in 1802. The introduction to it comprises a review of all the Spanish voyages of discovery along the north-west coast, in the course of which it is observed, that, from want of sufficient information in Spanish history, certain foreign writers had undervalued the merit of Cabrillo, by assigning to Drake the discovery of the coast between 38° and 48°; whereas, thirty-six years before Drake’s appearance on that coast, Cabrillo had discovered it between 38° and 43°. A note appended to this passage states:—“The true glory which the English navigator may claim for himself is the having discovered the portion of coast comprehended between the parallels of 43° and 48°; to which, consequently, the denomination of New Albion ought to be limited, without interfering with the discoveries of preceding navigators.” (Relacion del Viage hecho por las Goletas Sutil y Mexicana en el año de 1792. Introduccion, pp. xxxv. xxxvi.)

To the same purport, Alexander von Humboldt, in his Essai Politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne, says:—“D’après des données historiques certaines, la dénomination de Nouvelle Albion devrait être restreinte à la partie de la côte qui s’étend depuis les 43° aux 48°, ou du Cap de Martin de Aguilar, à l’entrée de Juan de Fuca,” (l. iii., c. viii.) And in another passage: “On trouve que Francisco Gali côtoya une partie de l’Archipel du Prince de Galles ou celui du Roi George (en 1582.) Sir Francis Drake, en 1578, n’était parvenu que jusqu’aux 48° de latitude au nord du cap Grenville, dans la Nouvelle Georgie.”

The question of the northern limits of Drake’s expedition has been rather fully entered into on this occasion, because it is apprehended that Drake’s visit constituted a discovery of that portion of the coast which was to the north of the furthest headland which Ferrelo reached in 1543, whether that headland were Cape Mendocino, or Cape Blanco; and because Mr. Greenhow, in the preface to the second edition of his History of Oregon and California, observes, that in the accounts and views there presented of Drake’s visit to the north-west coast, all who had criticised his work were silent, or carefully omitted to notice the principal arguments adduced by the author. We may conclude with observing, that on reviewing the evidence it will be seen, that in favour of the higher latitude of 48° we have a well authenticated account drawn up by the nephew of Sir Francis Drake himself, from the notes of several persons who went the voyage, confirmed by independent statements in two contemporary writers, Stow the annalist, and Davis the navigator, and supported by the authority of Sir W. Monson, who served with Drake in the Spanish wars after his return; and on this side we find ranked the influential judgment of the ablest modern writers who have given their attention to the subject, such as the distinguished French hydrographer Fleurieu, the able author of the Introduction to the Voyage of the Sutil and Mexicana, published by the authority of the king of Spain, and the learned and laborious Alexander von Humboldt. On the opposite side stands Hakluyt, and Hakluyt alone; for Camden and Purchas both followed Hakluyt implicitly, and though they may be considered to approve, they do not in any way confirm his account; while Hakluyt himself has nowhere disclosed his sources of information, and by the variation of the two editions of his work in the two most important facts of the whole voyage, namely, the extreme limits southward and northward respectively of Drake’s expedition, he has indirectly made evident the doubtful character of the information on which he relied, and has himself abandoned the version of the story, which Camden and the author of the Vie de Drach, have adopted upon his authority.

CHAPTER III.

ON THE DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA.

The Voyage of Francisco de Gualle, or Gali, in 1584.—Of Viscaino, in in 1598.—River of Martin d’Aguilar.—Cessation of Spanish Enterprises.—Jesuit Missions in California in the 18th century.—Voyage of Behring and Tchiricoff in 1741.—Presidios in Upper California.—Voyage of Juan Perez in 1774; of Heceta and de la Bodega in 1775.—Heceta’s Inlet.—Port Bucareli.—Bay of Bodega.—Hearne’s Journey to the Coppermine River.—Captain James Cook in 1776.—Russian Establishments, in 1783, as far as Prince William’s Sound; in 1787, as far as Mount Elias.—Expeditions from Macao, under the Portuguese flag, in 1785 and 1786; under that of the British East India Company in 1786.—Voyage of La Perouse in 1786.—King George’s Sound Company.—Portland and Dixon, in 1786.—Meares and Tipping, in 1786, under Flag of East India Company.—Duncan and Colnett in 1787.—Captain Barclay discovers in 1787 the Straits in 48° 30′, to which Meares gives the name of Juan de Fuca in 1788.—Prince of Wales’s Archipelago.—Gray and Kendrick.

The Spaniards had long coveted a position in the East Indies, but the Bull of Pope Alexander VI. precluded them from sailing eastward round the Cape of Good Hope; they had, in consequence, made many attempts to find their way thither across the Pacific. It was not, however, till 1564, that they succeeded in establishing themselves in the Philippine Islands. Thenceforth Spanish galleons sailed annually from Acapulco to Manilla, and back by Macao. The trade winds wafted them directly across from New Spain in about three months: on their return they occupied about double that time, and generally reached up into a northerly latitude, in order to avail themselves of the prevailing north-westers, which carried them to the shores of California.

An expedition of this kind is the next historical record of voyages on this coast, after Drake’s visit. Hakluyt has published the navigator’s own account of it in his edition of 1600, as the “True and perfect Description of a Voyage performed and done by Francisco de Gualle, a Spanish Captain and Pilot, &c., in the Year of our Lord 1584.” It purports to have been translated out of the original Spanish, verbatim, into Low Dutch, by J. H. van Lindschoten; and thence into English by Hakluyt. According to this version of it, Gualle, on his return from Macao, made the coast of New Spain “under seven-and-thirty degrees and a half.” The author of the “Introduction to the Journal of Galiano and Valdés” has substituted 57½ for 37½ degrees in Gualle’s, or rather Gali’s, account, without stating any reason for it. Mr. Greenhow, indeed, refers to a note of that author’s, as intimating that he relied upon the evidence of papers found in the archives of the Indies, but on examining the note in p. xlvi., it evidently refers to two letters from the Archbishop of Mexico, then Viceroy of New Spain, to the King, in reference to an expedition which he proposed to intrust to Jayme Juan, for the discovery of the Straits of Anian. It is true that the Archbishop is stated to have consulted Gali upon his project, but the author of the “Introduction” specially alludes to Lindschoten, as the person to whom the account of Gali’s Voyage in 1582 was due, and refers to a French Translation of Lindschoten’s work, under the title of “Le Grand Routier de Mer,” published at Amsterdam in 1638. But Lindschoten’s original work was written in the Dutch language, being intitled “Reysgeschrift van de Navigatien der Portugaloysers in Orienten,” and was published towards the end of the sixteenth century; and two English translations of Gali’s Voyage immediately appeared, one in Wolf’s edition of Lindschoten, in 1598; the other in the third volume of Hakluyt, 1598-1600. Lindschoten’s own Dutch version was subsequently inserted in Witsen’s “Nord en Oost Tarterye,” in 1692. All these latter accounts, including the original, agree in stating seven-and-thirty degrees and a half as the latitude where Gali discovered “a very high and fair land, with many trees, and wholly without snow.” The passage in the original Dutch may be referred to in Burney’s History of Voyages, vol. v., p. 164. The French translation, however, which the author of the Introduction consulted, gives 57½°, the number being expressed in figures; but as this seems to be the only authority for the change, it can hardly justify it. “A high land,” observes Captain Burney, “ornamented with trees, and entirely without snow, is not inapplicable to the latitude of 37½°, but would not be credible if said of the American coast in 57½° N., though nothing were known of the extraordinary high mountains which are on the western side of America in that parallel.” It may be observed, that the French translator has likewise misstated the course which Gali held in reaching across from Japan to the American coast, by rendering “east and east-by-north” in the original, as “east and north-east” in the French version, making a difference of three points in the compass, which would take him much farther north than his true course.

M. Eyriés, in the article “Gali,” in the Biographie Universelle, puts forward the same view of the cause of the variation of the latitude in the account adopted by the author of the Introduction, namely, that it was derived from the French translation which he consulted. The words in the French version of the Grand Routier de Mer are; “Estans venus suivant ce mesme cours près de la coste de la Nouvelle Espagne à la hauteur de 57 degrez et demi, nous approchasmes d’un haut et fort beau pays, orné de nombre d’arbres et entièrement sans neige.” M. Eyriés, however, has fallen into a curious mistake, as he represents Gali to have made the identical voyage which is the subject of the narrative, in company with Jayme Juan, in execution of the project of the Viceroy of Mexico, which was never accomplished, instead of his having made the account of the voyage for him. That M. Eyriés is in error will be evident, not merely from the account of the author of the Introduction, if more carefully examined, as well as from the title and conclusion of the Voyage of Gali itself, as given in Hakluyt’s translation of the Dutch version of Lindschoten; but also from this circumstance, which seems to be conclusive. M. de Contreras, Archbishop of Mexico, was Viceroy of New Spain for the short space of one year only, and the letters which he wrote to the King of Spain, submitting his project of an expedition to explore the north-west coast of America for his Majesty’s approval, bore date the 22d January and 8th March, 1585. But Gali commenced his voyage from Acapulco in March 1582, and had returned by the year 1584, most probably before the Archbishop had entered upon his office of Viceroy, certainly before he submitted his plans to the King, which he had matured after consultation with Gali. It is difficult to account for M. Eyriés’ mistake, unless it originated in an imperfect acquaintance with the Spanish language, as the statement by the author of the Introduction is by no means obscure. Gali’s voyage was thus a private mercantile enterprise, and not an expedition authorised and directed by the Government of New Spain, which the account of M. Eyriés might lead his reader to suppose. It has acquired, accidentally, rather more importance of late than it substantially deserves, from the circumstance of its having been cited in support of the Spanish title to the north-west coast of America; it has consequently been thought to merit a fuller examination on the present occasion, as to its true limits northward, which clearly fall short of those attained by the Spaniards under Ferrelo, and very far short of those reached by the British under Drake.

The next authentic expeditions on these coasts were those conducted by Sebastian Viscaino. The growing rumours of the discovery of the passage between the Atlantic and Pacific by the Straits of Anian, and the necessity of providing accurate charts for the vessels engaged in the trade between New Spain and the Philippine islands, induced Philip II. to direct an expedition to be dispatched from Acapulco in 1596, to survey the coasts. Nothing however of importance was accomplished on this occasion, but on the succession of Philip III. in 1598, fresh orders were despatched to carry into execution the intentions of his predecessor. Thirty-two charts, according to Humboldt, prepared by Henri Martinez, a celebrated engineer, prove that Viscaino surveyed these coasts with unprecedented care and intelligence. “The sickness, however, of his crew, the want of provisions, and the extreme severity of the season, prevented his advancing further north than a headland in the 42d parallel, to which he gave the name of Cape Sebastian.” The smallest of his three vessels, however, conducted by Martin d’Aguilar and Antonio Florez, doubled Cape Mendocino, and reached the 43d parallel, where they found the mouth of a river which Cabrillo has been supposed by some to have previously discovered in 1543, and which was for some time considered to be the western extremity of the long-sought Straits of Anian. The subsequent report of the captain of a Manilla ship, in 1620, according to Mr. Greenhow, led the world to adopt a different view, and to suppose that it was the mouth of a passage into the northern extremity of the Gulf of California; and accordingly, in maps of the later half of the seventeenth century, California was represented to be an island, of which Cape Blanco was the northernmost headland. After this error had been corrected by the researches of the Jesuit Kuhn, in 1709, we find in the maps of the eighteenth century, such as that of Guillaume de Lisle, published in Paris in 1722, California a peninsula, Cape Blanco a headland in 45°, and near it marked “Entrée découverte par d’Aguilar.”

With Gali and Viscaino terminates the brilliant period of Spanish discoveries along the north-west coast of America. The governors of New Spain during the remainder of the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth, confined their attention to securing the shores of the peninsula of California against the armed vessels of hostile Powers, which, after the discovery of the passage round Cape Horn in 1616, by the Dutch navigators Lemaire and Van Schouten, carried on their depredations in the Pacific with increasing frequency. The country itself of California, was in 1697 subjected, by a royal warrant, to an experimental process of civilisation at the hands of the Jesuits, which their success in Paraguay emboldened them to undertake. In about sixty years a chain of missions was established along the whole eastern side of California, and the followers of Loyola may be considered to have ruled the country, till the decree issued by Charles III. in 1767, for the immediate banishment of the society from the Spanish dominions, led to their expulsion from the New World. During this long period, the only expedition of discovery that ventured into these seas was that which Behring and Tchiricoff led forth in 1741 from the shores of Kamtchatka, under the Russian flag. Behring’s own voyage southward is not supposed to have extended beyond the 60th parallel of north latitude, where he discovered a stupendous mountain, visible at the distance of more than eighty miles, to which he gave the name of Mount St. Elias, which it still bears. The account is derived from the journal of Steller, the naturalist of Behring’s ship, which Professor Pallas first published in 1795, as Behring himself died on his voyage home, in one of the islands of the Aleutian Archipelago, between 54½ and 55½ degrees north latitude. Here his vessel had been wrecked, and the island still bears the name of the Russian navigator. Tchiricoff, on the other hand, advanced further eastward, and the Russians themselves maintain that he pushed his discoveries as far south as the 49th parallel of north latitude, (Letter from the Chevalier de Poletica, Russian Minister, to the Secretary of State at Washington, February 28, 1822, in British and Foreign State Papers, 1821-22, p. 483;) but this has been disputed. Mr. Greenhow considers, from the description of the latitude and bearings of the land discovered by him, that it must have been one of the islands of the Prince of Wales’s Archipelago, in about 56°.

The discoveries of the Russians, of which vague rumours had found their way into Europe, and of which a detailed account was given to the Academy of Sciences at Paris, in 1750, by J. N. de l’Isle, the astronomer, on his return from St. Petersburg, revived the attention of Spain to the importance of securing her possessions in the New World against the encroachments of other Powers. It was determined that the vacant coasts and islands adjacent to the settled provinces of New Spain should be occupied, so as to protect them against casual expeditions, and that the more distant shores should be explored, so as to secure to the crown of Spain a title to them, on the grounds of first discovery. With this object “the Marine Department of San Blas” was organised, and was charged with the superintendence of all operations by sea. Its activity was evinced by the establishment of eight “Presidios” along the coast in Upper California, in the interval of the ten years immediately preceding 1779. Of these San Diego, in 32° 39′ 30″, was the most southerly; San Francisco, in 38° 48′ 30″, the most northerly. During the same period, three expeditions of discovery were dispatched from San Blas. The earliest of these sailed forth in January, 1774, under the command of Juan Perez, but its results were not made known before 1802, when the narrative of the expedition of the Sutil and Mexicana was published, as already stated. According to this account, Perez, having touched at San Diego and Monterey, steered out boldly into the open sea, and made the coast of America again in 53° 53′ north. In the latitude of 55° he discovered a headland, to which he gave the name of Santa Margarita, at the northern extremity of Queen Charlotte’s Island. The strait which separates this island from that of the Prince of Wales, is henceforward marked in Spanish maps as the Entrada de Perez. A scanty supply of water, however, soon compelled him to steer southward, and he cast anchor in the Bay of San Lorenzo in 49° 30′, in the month of August, and for a short time engaged in trade with the natives. Spanish writers identify the bay of San Lorenzo with that to which Captain Cook, four years afterwards, gave the name of Nootka Sound. Perez was prevented from landing on this coast by the stormy state of the weather, and his vessel was obliged to cut her cables, and put to sea with the loss of her anchors. He is supposed, in coasting southward, to have caught sight of Mount Olympus in 47° 47′. Having determined the true latitude of C. Mendocino, he returned to San Blas, after about eight months’ absence. Unfortunately for the fame of Perez, the claim now maintained for him to the discovery of Nootka Sound, was kept secret by the Spaniards till after general consent had assigned it to Captain Cook. The Spaniards have likewise advanced a claim to the discovery of the Straits of Fuca, upon the authority of Don Esteban José Martinez, the pilot of the Santiago, Perez’ vessel; who, according to Mr. Greenhow, announced many years afterwards that he remembered to have observed a wide opening in the land between 48° and 49°: and they have consequently marked in their charts the headland at the entrance of the straits as Cape Martinez. No allusion, however, is made to this claim in the Introduction to the Voyage of the Sutil and Mexicana, nor in Humboldt’s New Spain.

In the following year (1775) a second expedition sailed from San Blas under the orders of Don Bruno Heceta, Don Juan de Ayala, and Don Juan de la Bodega y Quadra. The Spanish government observed their usual prudent silence as to the results of this expedition, but the journal of Antonio Maurelle, “the second pilot of the fleet,” who acted as pilot in the Senora, which Bodega commanded, fell into the hands of the Hon. Daines Barrington, who published an English translation of it in his Miscellanies, in 1781. There are four other accounts in MS. amongst the archives at Madrid. From one of these, the journal of Heceta himself, a valuable extract is given in Mr. Greenhow’s Appendix. Their first discovery north of C. Mendocino, was a small port in 41° 7′, to which they gave the name of La Trinidad, and where they fixed up a cross, which Vancouver found still remaining in 1793. They then quitted the coast, and did not make the land again till they reached 48° 26′, whence they examined the shore in vain towards the south for the supposed Strait of Fuca, which was placed in Bellin’s fanciful chart, constructed in 1766, between 47° and 48°. Having had seven of the Senora’s men massacred by the natives in the latitude of 47° 20′, where twelve years later a portion of the crew of the Imperial Eagle were surprised and murdered, they resumed their voyage northward, though Heceta, owing to the sickness of his crew, was anxious to return. A storm soon afterwards separated the two vessels, and Heceta returned southward. On his voyage homewards he first made the land on the 10th of August, in 49° 30′, on the south-west side of the great island now known as Vancouver’s Island, and passing the part which Perez had visited, came upon the main land below the entrance of the Straits of Fuca. On the 17th of August, as he was sailing along the coast between 46° 40′ and 46° 4′, according to Heceta’s own report, or in 46° 9′ according to the Introduction to the Voyage of the Sutil and Mexicana, Heceta discovered a great bay, the head of which he could no where recognise. So strong, however, were the currents and eddies of the water, that he believed it to be “the mouth of some great river, or passage to another sea.” He was disposed, according to his own statement, to conceive it to be the same with the Straits of Fuca, as he was satisfied no such straits existed between 47° and 48°, where they were laid down in the charts. He did not, however, venture to cast anchor; and the force of the currents, during the night, swept him too far to leeward to allow him to examine it any further. Heceta named the northern headland of the bay, C. San Roque; and the southern headland, C. Frondoso; and to the bay itself he gave the name of the Assumption, though, in the Spanish charts, according to Humboldt, it is termed “l’Ensenada de Ezeta,” Heceta’s Inlet. Heceta likewise gave the name of C. Falcon to a headland in 45° 43′, known since as C. Lookout; and continuing his course to the southward along the coast, reached Monterey on August 30th.

De la Bodega, in the mean time, had stretched out to 56°, when he unexpectedly made the coast, 135 leagues more to the westward than Bellin’s chart had led him to expect. He soon afterwards discovered the lofty conical mountain in King George III.’s Archipelago, to which he gave the name of San Jacinto, and which Cook subsequently called Mount Edgecumb, and having reached the 58th parallel, turned back to examine that portion of the coast, where the Rio de los Reyes was placed in the story of the adventures of Admiral Fonte. Having looked for this fabulous stream in vain, they landed and took possession of the shores of an extensive bay, in 55° 30′, in the Prince of Wales’ Archipelago, which they named Port Bucareli, in honour of the Viceroy. Proceeding southward, they observed the Entrada de Perez, north of Queen Charlotte’s Island; but, though coasting from 49° within a mile of the shore, according to Maurelle’s account, they overlooked the entrance of Fuca’s Straits. A little below 47° unfavourable winds drove them off the coast, which they made once more in 45° 27′; from which parallel they searched in vain to 42° for the river of Martin d’Aguilar. In the latitude of 38° 18′ they reached a spacious and sheltered bay, which they had imagined to be Port San Francisco; but it proved to be a distinct bay, not yet laid down in any chart, so De la Bodega bestowed his own name upon it, having noted in his journal that it was here that Sir Francis Drake careened his ship. Vancouver, however, considered the bay of Sir Francis Drake to be distinct from this bay of Bodega, as well as from that of San Francisco.

Expeditions had been, in the mean time, made by direction of the Hudson’s Bay Company, across the northern regions of North America, to determine, if possible, the existence of the supposed northern passage between Hudson’s Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Samuel Hearne, one of the Company’s agents, in 1771, in the course of one of these journeys, succeeded in tracing a river, since known as the Coppermine River, to a sea, where the flux and reflux of the tide was observed. Hearne calculated the mouth of this river to be in about 72° north latitude; and he had assured himself, by his own observations, that no channel connecting the two seas extended across the country which he had traversed. It appears that a parliamentary grant of 20,000l. had been voted, in 1745, by the House of Commons, for the discovery of a north-west passage, through Hudson’s Bay, by ships belonging to his Britannic Majesty’s subjects; and in 1776, this reward was further extended to the ships of his Majesty, which might succeed in discovering a northern passage between the two oceans, in any direction or under any parallel north of 52°. The Lords of the British Admiralty, in pursuance of Hearne’s report, determined on sending out an expedition to explore the north-easternmost coast of the Pacific; and Captain James Cook, who had just returned from an expedition in the southern hemisphere, was ordered, in 1776, to proceed round the Cape of Good Hope to the coast of New Albion, in 45 degrees. He was besides directed to avoid all interference with the establishments of European Powers: to explore the coast northward, after reaching New Albion, up to 65°; and there to commence a search for a river or inlet which might communicate with Hudson’s Bay. He was further directed to take possession, in the name of his sovereign, of any countries which he might discover to be uninhabited; and if there should be inhabitants in any parts not yet discovered by other European powers, to take possession of them, with the consent of the natives. No authentic details of any discoveries had been made public by the Spaniards since the expedition of Viscaino, in 1602, though rumours of certain voyages along the north-west coast of America, made by order of the viceroy of New Spain, in the two preceding years, had reached England shortly before Cook sailed; but the information was too vague to afford Cook any safe directions.

The expedition reached the shores of New Albion in 44° north, and thence coasted at some distance off up to 48°. Cook arrived at the same conclusion which Heceta had adopted, that between 47° and 48° north there were no Straits of Fuca, as alleged. He seems to have passed unobserved the arm of the sea a little further northward, having most probably struck across to the coast of Vancouver’s Island, which trends north-westward. Having now reached the parallel of 49° 30′, he cast anchor in a spacious bay, to which he gave the name of King George’s Sound; but the name of Nootka, borrowed from the natives, has since prevailed. It has been supposed, as already stated, that Nootka Sound was the bay in which Perez cast anchor, and which he named Port San Lorenzo; and that the implements of European manufacture, which Captain Cook, to his great surprise, found in the possession of one of the natives, were obtained on that occasion from the Spaniards. The first notification, however, of the existence of this important harbour, dates from this visit of Captain Cook, who continued his voyage northward up to the 59th parallel, and from that point commenced his survey of the coast, in the hope of discovering a passage into the Atlantic. It is unnecessary to trace his course onward. Although Spanish navigators claim to have seen portions of the coast of North America between the limits of 43° and 55° prior to his visit, yet their discoveries had not been made public, and their observations had been too cursory and vague to lead to any practical result. Captain Cook is entitled, beyond dispute, to the credit of having first dispelled the popular errors respecting the extent of the continents of America and Asia, and their respective proximity: and as Drake, according to Fletcher, changed the name of the land south of Magellan’s Straits from Terra Incognita to Terra nunc bene Cognita, so Cook was assuredly entitled to change the name of the North Pacific Sea from “Mare Incognitum” to “Mare nunc bene Cognitum.”

On the return of the vessels engaged in this expedition to England, where they arrived in October, 1780, it was thought expedient by the Board of Admiralty to delay the publication of an authorised account, as Great Britain was engaged in hostilities with the United States in America, and with France and Spain in the Old World. The Russians in the mean time hastened to avail themselves of the information which they had obtained when Captain King, on his way homewards by China, touched at the harbor of Petropawlosk, and an association was speedily formed amongst the fur merchants of Siberia and Kamtchatka to open a trade with the shores of the American continent. An expedition was in consequence dispatched in 1783, for the double purpose of trading and exploring, and several trading posts were established between Aliaska and Prince William’s Sound. Mr. Greenhow (p. 161) assigns to this period the Russian establishment on the island of Kodiak, near the entrance of the bay called Cook’s Bay, but the Russian authorities refer this settlement to a period as remote as 1763. (Letter from the Chevalier de Poletica to the Secretary of State at Washington, 28th February, 1822. British and Foreign State Papers, 1821-22, p. 484.) The Russian establishments seem to have extended themselves in 1787, and the following year as far as Admiralty Bay, at the foot of Mount Elias. The publication, however, of the journals of Cook’s expedition, which took place in 1784-5, soon introduced a host of rival traders into these seas. Private expeditions were dispatched from Macao, under the Portuguese flag, in 1785 and 1786, and under the flag of the East India Company in 1786. In the month of June of this latter year, La Perouse, in command of a French expedition of discovery, arrived off the coast, and cast anchor in a bay near the foot of Mount Fairweather, in about 59°, which he named Port des Français. He thence skirted the coast southward past Port Bucareli, the western shores of Queen Charlotte’s Island, and Nootka, and reached Monterey in September, where having stayed sixteen days, he bade adieu to the north-west coast of America. La Perouse seems first to have suspected the separation of Queen Charlotte’s Island from the continent, but as no account of the results of this expedition was published before 1797, other navigators forestalled him in the description of nearly all the places which he had visited.

In the August of 1785, in which year La Perouse had sailed, an association in London, styled the King George’s Sound Company, dispatched two vessels under the command of Captains Dixon and Portlock, to trade with the natives on the American coast, under the protection of licences from the South Sea Company, and in correspondence with the East India Company. They reached Cook’s River in July 1786, where they met with Russian traders, and intended to winter in Nootka Sound, but were driven off the coast by tempestuous weather to the Sandwich Isles. Returning northward in the spring of 1787, they found Captain Meares, with his vessel the Nootka, frozen up in Prince William’s Sound. Meares had left Calcutta in January 1786, whilst his intended consort, the Sea Otter, commanded by Captain Tipping, had been dispatched to Malacca, with instructions to proceed to the north-west coast of America; and there carry on a fur trade in company with the Nootka. Both these vessels sailed under the flag of the East India Company. Meares, after having with some difficulty got clear of the Russian establishment at Kodiak, reached Cook’s River soon after Dixon and Portlock had quitted it, and proceeded to Prince William’s Sound, where he expected to meet the Sea Otter; but Captain Tipping and his vessel were never seen by him again after leaving Calcutta, though Meares was led by the natives to suppose that his consort had sailed from Prince William’s Sound a few days before his arrival. He determined, however, to pass the winter here, in preference to sailing to the Sandwich Isles, lest he should be prevented returning to the coast of America. Here indeed the severity of the cold, coupled with scurvy, destroyed more than half of his crew, and the survivors were found in a state of extreme distress by Dixon and Portlock, on their return to the coast in the following spring.

We have now reached a period when many minute and detached discoveries took place. Prince William’s Sound and Nootka appear to have been the two great stations of the fur trade, and it seems to have been customary, in most of the trading expeditions of this period, that two vessels should be dispatched in company, so as to divide the labor of visiting the trading posts along the coast. Thus, whilst Portlock remained between Prince William’s Sound and Mount St. Elias, Dixon directed his course towards Nootka, and being convinced on his voyage, from the reports of the natives, that the land between 52° and 54° was separated from the continent, as La Perouse had suspected, he did not hesitate to call it Queen Charlotte’s Island, from the name of his vessel, and to give to the passage to the northward of it, which is marked on Spanish maps as the Entrada de Perez, the name of Dixon’s Entrance. Before Dixon and Portlock quitted these coasts, in 1787, other vessels had arrived to share in the profits of the fur trade. Amongst these the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales had been despatched from England, by the King George’s Sound Company, under command of Captains Duncan and Colnett; whilst the Imperial Eagle, under Captain Barclay, an Englishman, displayed in those seas for the first time the flag of the Austrian East India Company. To a boat’s crew belonging to this latter vessel Captain Meares assigns the discovery of the straits in 48° 30′, to which he himself gave in the following year the name of Juan de Fuca, from the old Greek pilot, whose curious story has been preserved in Purchas’ Pilgrims. (Introduction to Meares’ Voyages, p. lv.) Meares had succeeded in returning to Macao with the Nootka, in October, 1787. In the next year he was once more upon the American coast, as two other vessels, named the Felice and Iphigenia, were despatched from Macao, under Meares and Captain Douglas respectively, the former being sent direct to Nootka, the latter being ordered to make for Cook’s River, and thence proceeding southward to join her consort. Meares, in his Observations on a North-west Passage, states that Captain Douglas anticipated Captain Duncan, of the Princess Royal, in being the first to sail through the Channel which separates Queen Charlotte’s Island from the main land, and thereby confirming the suppositions of La Perouse and Dixon. Captain Duncan, however, appears at all events to have explored this part of the coast more carefully than Douglas had done, and he first discovered the group of small islands, which he named the Prince of Wales’ Archipelago. The announcement of this discovery seemed to some persons to warrant them in giving credit once more to the exploded story of Admiral Fonte’s voyage, and revived the expectation of discovering the river, which the admiral is described to have ascended near 53° into a lake communicating with the Atlantic Ocean. It is almost needless to observe, that these expectations have never been realised.

The names of several vessels have been omitted in this brief summary, which were engaged in the fur trade subsequently to the year 1785. Two vessels, however, require notice,—the Washington under Captain Gray, and the Columbia under Captain Kendrick, which were despatched from Boston, under the American flag, in August, 1787. Captain Gray reached Nootka Sound, on Sept. 17, 1788, and found Meares preparing to launch a small vessel called the North-west America, which he had built there. The Columbia does not appear to have joined her consort till after the departure of Meares and his companions. Meares himself set sail in the Felice for China, on Sept. 23, whilst the Iphigenia proceeded with the North-west America to the Sandwich Islands, and wintered there. In the spring of 1789, the two latter vessels returned to Nootka Sound, and found the Columbia had joined her consort the Washington, and both had wintered there. The North-west America was despatched forthwith on a trading expedition northward, whilst the Iphigenia remained at anchor in Nootka Sound.

Events were now at hand which were attended with very important consequences in determining the relations of Spain and Great Britain towards each other in respect to the trade with the natives on their coasts, and to the right of forming settlements among them. These will fitly be reserved, as introductory to the Convention of the Escurial, which will be discussed in a subsequent Chapter.

CHAPTER IV.

ON THE PRETENDED DISCOVERIES OF THE NORTH-WEST COAST.

Memoir of Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, in 1588.—Voyage of the Descubierta and Atrevida, in 1791.—Tale of Juan de Fuca, in 1592.—Voyages of Meares, Vancouver, and Lieutenant Wilkes.—Letter of Admiral Bartolemé Fonte or de Fuentes, in 1640.—Memoir of J. N. de l’Isle and Ph. Buache, in 1750.—California discovered to be a Peninsula in 1540; reported to be an Island in 1620; re-explored by the Jesuit Kuhn and others, in 1701-21.—Maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries.—Fonte’s Letter, a jeu-d’esprit of Petiver, the Naturalist.

The general belief in the existence of a North-west passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean in the direction of Gaspar de Cortereal’s reported Straits of Anian, led to the circulation of many false accounts of the discovery of the desired channel. The most celebrated fictions of this class seem to have originated with individuals who hoped to secure, through their pretended knowledge and experience, future employment, as well as immediate emolument. A memoir of this kind is reported to have been laid before the Council of the Indies at Seville, in 1609, by Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, who professed to have sailed in 1588 from Lisbon to the coast of Labrador, and thence into the South Sea through a channel in 60° north latitude, corresponding to the Strait of Anian, according to ancient tradition. He petitioned, in consequence, that he might be rewarded for his services, and be entrusted with an expedition to occupy the Strait of Anian, and defend the passage against other nations. His cotemporaries, according to the author of the Introduction to the Voyage of the Sutil and Mexicana, were men of more judgment and intelligence than some of the writers of the 18th century. The former at once discovered, by personal examination of the author, the fictitious character of his narrative, and rejected his proposal. Two copies of this memoir are supposed to exist; one of these being preserved in the library of the Duke of Infantado at Madrid, the other in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. The former of these is considered by the author of the Introduction to be certainly a cotemporaneous, and perhaps the original, copy of the memoir: the Ambrosian manuscript, on the other hand, has been pronounced, in an article in the London Quarterly Review for October, 1816, to be “the clumsy and audacious forgery of some ignorant German,” from the circumstance of fifteen leagues to the degree being used in some of the computations. To the same purpose Capt. James Burney, in the fifth volume of his Voyages, published in 1817, observes, that “it must not be omitted that the reckoning in the narrative is in German leagues. It is said, ‘from the latitude of 64° you will have to sail 120 leagues to the latitude of 72°, which corresponds with the German league of 15 to a degree, and not with the Spanish league of 17½ to a degree, by which last the early Spanish navigators were accustomed to reckon.’ From this peculiarity in the narrative it may be conjectured, that the real author was a Fleming, who probably thought he could not better advance his spurious offspring, than by laying it at the door of a man who had projected to invent a compass without variation,” as Maldonado professed to do to the Council of the Indies, according to Antonio Leo in his Bibliotheca Indica.

Allusions had been occasionally made to this work by Spanish writers in the 17th century, amongst others by De Luque, the author of the “Establecimientos Ultramarinos de las Naceones Europeas.” It was not, however, till so late a period as 1790 that the attention of men of science was drawn to the Madrid manuscript by J. N. Buache, the geographer of the King of France, in a paper read before the Academy of Sciences at Paris in that year. Captain Burney states, that the manuscript had been brought to notice shortly before by M. de Mendoza, a captain in the Spanish navy, who was employed in forming a collection of voyages for the use of that service. M. Buache, who had succeeded D’Anville as Geographer Royal in 1768, followed the geographical system of Ph. Buache, his relative and predecessor, and, like him, clung fondly to questionable discoveries. He had been employed to prepare instructions for the expedition of La Perouse, and thus his attention had been especially drawn to voyages of discovery on the north-west coast of America. He declared himself in his memoir so strongly in favor of the genuineness of the manuscript, and of the good faith of Maldonado, that the Spanish government, in order that the question might be definitively set at rest, directed its archives to be searched, and the manuscript in the library of the Duke of Infantado to be carefully examined, and at the same time gave orders that the corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida, which were fitting out at Acapulco for a voyage round the world, should explore the coasts and port which Maldonado pretended to have discovered in the South Sea. The archives, however, furnished ample evidence of the correctness of the ancient opinion that Maldonado was an impostor, and the expedition of the corvettes, which sailed in 1791, confirmed this fact beyond dispute. A memoir to that effect, founded upon their observations, was published in 1797, by Don Ciriaco Cevallos, who had accompanied the expedition, to prove the utter falsity of Maldonado’s story.

It was, however, once more revived by the discovery of the Ambrosian manuscript in 1812 by Carlo Amoretti. This is said to give a more succinct account than the Madrid document, and it has been thought by some to be an abridgment of it. The article in the Quarterly Review above alluded to was occasioned by its appearance, and to the curious will furnish ample information. The Milan account of the voyage may be referred to in the fifth volume of Burney’s History of Voyages. The Madrid document will be found in Barrow’s Chronological History of Voyages in the Arctic Regions.

A much more plausible narrative was published in 1625, in the third volume of “The Pilgrims,” by Purchas, the successor of Hakluyt as the historian of maritime enterprises. It is entitled “A Note made by me, Michael Lock the elder, touching the Strait of Sea, commonly called Fretum Anian, in the South Sea, through the North-west Passage of Meta Incognita.” The writer purported to give an account of what had been communicated to him at Venice, in April, 1596, by an ancient Greek pilot, commonly called Juan de Fuca, but properly named Apostolos Valerianus, who represented himself to have been taken in a Spanish ship by Captain Candish, and to have thereby lost 60,000 ducats, and to have been at another time sent by the Viceroy of Mexico to discover and fortify the Straits of Anian. His tale was to this effect: “That shortly afterwards, having been sent again, in 1592, by the Viceroy of Mexico, with a small caravel and pinnace, armed with mariners only, he followed the coast of North America until he came to the latitude of 47°, and there finding that the land trended east and north-east, with a broad inlet of sea between 47 and 48 degrees of latitude, he entered thereinto, sailing therein more than twenty days, and found that land trending still sometimes north-west and north-east and north, and also east, and south-eastward, and very much broader sea than was at the said entrance, and that he passed by divers islands in that sailing. And that at the entrance of this said strait, there is on the north-west coast thereof a great headland or island, with an exceeding high pinnacle or spired rock, like a pillar, thereupon.

“Also, he said, he went on land in divers places, and there he saw some people on land, clad is beasts’ skins; and that the land is very fruitful, and rich of gold, silver, pearls, and other things, like new Spain.

“And also, he said, that he being entered thus far into the said strait, and being come into the North Sea already, and finding the sea wide enough everywhere, and to be about thirty or forty leagues wide in the mouth of the straits, where he entered, he thought that he had now well discharged his office, and that not being armed to resist the force of the savage people that might happen, he therefore set sail, and returned homewards again towards New Spain, where he arrived at Acapulco, anno 1592, hoping to be rewarded by the Viceroy for the service done in the said voyage.

“Also, he said that, after coming to Mexico, he was greatly welcomed by the Viceroy, and had promises of great reward; but that having sued there for two years, and obtained nothing to his content, the Viceroy told him that he should be rewarded in Spain of the King himself very greatly, and willed him therefore to go to Spain, which voyage he did perform.

“Also, he said, that when he was come into Spain, he was welcomed there at the King’s court; but after long suit there also, he could not get any reward there to his content. And therefore at length he stole away out of Spain, and came into Italy, to go home again and live among his own kindred and countrymen, he being very old.

“Also, he said, that he thought the cause of his ill reward had of the Spaniards, to be for that they did understand very well that the English nation had now given over all their voyages for discovery of the North-west Passage, wherefore they need not fear them any more to come that way into the South Sea, and therefore they needed not his service therein any more.

“Also, he said, that understanding the noble mind of the Queen of England, of her wars against the Spaniards, and hoping that her majesty would do him justice for his goods lost by Captain Candish, he would be content to go into England, and serve her majesty in that voyage for the discovery perfectly of the north-west passage into the South Sea, if she would furnish him with only one ship of forty tons burthen and a pinnace, and that he would perform it in thirty days time from one end to the other of the straits, and he wished me so to write to England.”

As this asserted discovery was one upon which the Spanish commissioner, in the negotiations antecedent to the Treaty of the Floridas, relied to support the claim of the Spanish crown to the north-west coast of America, and as authors of late whose opinions are entitled to respect, such as Fleurieu, and Mr. Greenhow, have inclined to admit the general truth of the account, the substantial part of it has been quoted at full length, as it appears both that Fuca’s narrative, if we admit it to be genuine, does not accord, in respect to any substantial fact, with the authentic reports of subsequent voyages, and that the object of the fiction is patent on the face of the story.

The object of the Greek pilot was evidently to obtain, upon the faith of his narrative, employment from the Queen of England; and as, from his own statement, he was aware that the spirit of discovery was for the moment languid amongst the English nation, he represented the country as “very fruitful and rich of gold, silver, pearls, and other things, like New Spain.” This exaggeration of the probable profits of the undertaking would not perhaps alone disentitle the narrator to credit in respect to the other circumstances of his voyage, though his integrity in making the communication might thereby become open to question: but when we look to the asserted facts of his voyage, the truth or falsehood of which must be conclusive as to the character of the narrative itself, we find that they do not correspond in any respect with ascertained facts. The straits to which Meares gave the name of Juan de Fuca in 1788, are between the 48th and 49th parallel. Mr. Greenhow considers that the difference in the position is sufficiently slight as to be within the limits of supposable error on the part of the Greek pilot; and certainly, if this were the only difficulty, it might not be conclusive against his veracity. But the straits which he professed to have discovered were from 30 to 40 leagues wide at the mouth where he entered, and according to his story he sailed through them into the North Sea, and upon the faith of this he offered to perfect his discovery of the north-west passage into the South Sea for the Queen of England, and to perform it in thirty days time from one end to the other of the straits. Now this description is so totally at variance with the real character of any straits on the west coast of America, that the happy coincidence of trifling circumstances can hardly be considered sufficient to turn the scale in its favor. Amongst the latter, the existence of a pillar has been alleged, as corresponding with De Fuca’s account. Meares, for instance, on approaching the straits from the north, speaks “of a small island, situated about two miles from the southern land, that formed the entrance of this strait, near which we saw a very remarkable rock, that wore the form of an obelisk, and stood at some distance from the island,” (p. 153,) which, in his Observations on a North-west Passage (p. lxi.) he seems to consider to be the pinnacle rock of De Fuca; but unfortunately De Fuca has placed his “island with an exceeding high pinnacle or spiral rock” on the north-west coast, at the entrance of the strait, instead of on the southern shore. Vancouver, on entering the straits, failed himself to recognize any rock as corresponding to the pinnacle rock which Mr. Meares had represented, but he observes that a rock within Tatooche’s Island, on the southern side of the entrance, which is united to the main land by a ledge of rocks, over which the sea breaks violently, was noticed, and supposed to be that represented as De Fuca’s pinnacle rock: “this, however, was visible only for a few minutes, from its being close to the shore of the main-land, instead of lying in the entrance of the straits, nor did it correspond with that which has been so described.” On the other hand, Lieutenant Wilkes, in his Account of the United States Exploring Expedition, says, “In leaving De Fuca’s Straits, I anxiously watched for De Fuca’s Pillar, and soon obtained a sketch of it;” but he does not state whether he meant the pillar which Meares observed on the southern side, and called De Fuca’s Pillar, or one which, according to the Greek pilot, should have formed a prominent object on the north-western coast of the strait.

It is not unimportant to observe, that there is no Spanish writer who speaks of De Fuca or his discovery: that neither in any private archives in Spain, nor in the public archives of the Indies at Seville, is there any notice of this celebrated navigator or of his important expedition, which the author of the Introduction to the Voyage of the Sutil and Mexicana observes is the more remarkable, from the great number of other voyages and expeditions of the same period preserved in the archives, which have escaped the notice of contemporary writers; and, what is perhaps still more conclusive, that Humboldt, in his account of New Spain, (l. iii., ch. viii.,) states, that in spite of all his researches he had not been able to find throughout New Spain a single document in which the name of the pilot De Fuca occurs.

The whole of these latter observations apply with equal force to the voyage of Admiral Bartolemé Fonte or de Fuentes, which purposes to have been performed in 1640; the narrative, however, did not make its appearance till 1708, when it was published in London, in two parts, in “The Monthly Miscellany, or Memoirs of the Curious.” The mode in which it was ushered into public notice would alone be sufficient to expose it to considerable suspicion, and the gross absurdities with which it is replete would have at once exempted it from any serious criticism, had not the Spanish commissioner, in the negotiations already alluded to, and of which a full account will be given in a subsequent place, rested upon it the territorial title of Spain to the north-west coast, up to 55° of north latitude. Fonte, according to the narrative, sailed with four vessels from Callao into the North Pacific, with orders from the Viceroy of Peru to intercept certain vessels which had sailed from Boston in New England, with the object of exploring a north-west passage. On arriving at C. St. Lucas, at the south point of California, he despatched one of his vessels “to discover whether California was an island or not, (for before, it was not known whether it was an island or a peninsula.”) He thence coasted along California to 26° of north latitude, and having a steady gale from the S.S.E., in the interval between May 26, and June 14, “he reached the River los Reyes in 53° of north latitude, not having occasion to lower a top-sail in sailing 866 leagues N.N.W., 410 leagues from Port Abel to C. Blanco, 456 leagues to Rio de los Reyes, having sailed about 260 leagues in crooked channels, amongst islands named the Archipelagus de St. Lazarus, where his ships’ boats always sailed a mile a-head, sounding, to see what water, rocks, and sands there was.” “They had two Jesuits with them, that had been on their mission at 66° of N. L., and had made curious observations.” Fonte ascended the Rio de los Reyes in his ships to a large lake, which he called Lake Belle. Here, he says, he left his vessels and proceeded down another river, passing eight falls, in all 32 feet perpendicular, into a large lake which he named De Fonte. Thence he sailed out through the Estrecho de Ronquillo into the sea, where they found a large ship where the natives had never seen one before, from a town called Boston, the master of which, Captain Shaply, told him that his owner was “a fine gentleman, and major-general of the largest colony in New England, called the Maltechusets.” Having exchanged all sorts of civilities and presents with this gentleman, the admiral went back to his ships in Lake Belle, and returned by the Rio de los Reyes to the South Sea. One of his officers had in the mean time ascended another river, which he named Rio de Haro, in the lake Velasco, in 61°, whence he sailed in Indian boats as far north as 77°. Here he ascertained that there was no communication out of the Spanish or Atlantic Sea by Davis’ Straits, from one of his own seamen, who had been conducted by the natives to the head of Davis’ Strait, which terminated in a fresh lake of about 30 miles in circumference, in 80° N. L. He himself in the meantime had sailed as far north as 79°, and then the land trended north, and the ice rested on the land. The result of this expedition was, that they returned home, “having found there was no passage into the South Seas by what they call the North-west Passage.”

Such is the substance of this rather dull story, which may be read in full in the third volume of Burney’s History of Voyages in the South Sea, p. 190. Mr. Greenhow (p. 84) observes, that “the account is very confused and badly written, and is filled with absurdities and contradictions, which should have prevented it from receiving credit at any time since its appearance: yet, as will be shown, it was seriously examined and defended, so recently as in the middle of the last century, by scientific men of great eminence, and some faith continued to be attached to it for many years afterwards.”

Amongst its defenders the most conspicuous were J. N. de l’Isle, the brother of William de l’Isle, and Philippe Buache, the geographer of the French King, the predecessor of J. N. Buache, who has already been mentioned as the author of a memoir in defence of Maldonado’s narrative. De l’Isle presented to the Academy of Sciences, in 1750, a memoir “sur les nouvelles découvertes au nord de la mer du Sud,” with a map prepared by Ph. Buache, to represent these discoveries. The communication was in other respects of great importance, as it contained the first authentic account of the discoveries lately made by Behring and Tchiricoff, in 1741. It is not stated from what source De l’Isle derived the copy of Fonte’s letter, which seems to have come into his possession accidentally at St. Petersburg, during the absence of the Russian expedition: it was not, however, till his return to France in 1747, that he examined it in company with Ph. Buache. They were agreeably surprised to find that it accorded with Buache’s own conjectures, that it harmonised in many respects with the discoveries of the Russians. In consequence, Buache laid down in his new map a water communication between the Pacific Ocean and Hudson’s Bay. Voltaire, relying on the authority of De l’Isle, maintained in his History of Russia, published in 1759, that the famous passage so long sought for had been at last discovered. The Academy, however, received Fonte’s narrative with discreet reserve; and observed, that it required more certain proofs to substantiate it.

The author of the Introduction to the Voyage of the Sutil and Mexicana states, that the Spanish government, on the representation of the French geographers, instituted a careful search into the archives of the Indies in New Spain, as well as into the archives of Peru, and likewise into the archives at Seville, Madrid, Cadiz, and other places, but that not the slightest allusion to De Fonte could be anywhere traced. This result was made known by Robert de Vaugondy, in his reply to Buache, intitled “Observations Critiques sur les nouvelles Découvertes de l’Amiral Fuentes, 8vo. 1753;” and the author of the Noticia di California, published in Madrid, in 1757, confirmed Vaugondy’s announcement.

It is unnecessary to observe, that the experience of subsequent navigators has failed to confirm the narrative of De Fonte. There is one passage in the narrative which seems almost of itself to be sufficient to condemn the story. The admiral is made to state, “that he despatched one of his vessels to discover whether California was an island or not; for before it was not known whether California was an island or a peninsula.” Now the Californian Gulf had been completely explored by Francisco de Ulloa, in 1539, who ascertained the fact of the junction of the peninsula to the main land, near the 32d degree of latitude; and again by Fernando de Alarcon, in 1540, who ascended a great river at the head of the Gulf of California, supposed to be the Colorado. A series of excellent charts were drawn up by Domingo del Castillo, Alarcon’s pilot, a fac-simile of which Mr. Greenhow (p. 61) states may be found in the edition of the letters of Cortez, published at Mexico in 1770, by Archbishop Lorenzana. The shores of the gulf, and of the west side of California, to the 30th degree of latitude, were there delineated with a surprising approach of accuracy. It is not a reasonable supposition that the Admiral of New Spain and Peru, who must have had ready access to the archives of the Indies at Mexico, should have expressed himself in a manner which argued a total ignorance of the previous discoveries of his countrymen; but it was very probable that a contributor to the Monthly Miscellany should stumble upon this ground, from a notion having been revived in Europe, about the middle of the 17th century, that California was an island.

Humboldt, in his Essai Politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne, l. iii., c. viii., states, that when the Jesuits Kühn, Salvatierra, and Ugarte, explored, in detail, during the years 1701-21, the coasts of the Gulf of California, it was thought in Europe to have been for the first time discovered that California was a peninsula. But, in his Introduction Géographique, he observes, that in the sixteenth century no person in Mexico denied this fact; nor was it till the seventeenth century that the idea originated that California was an island. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch freebooters were amongst the most active and inveterate enemies of Spain in the New World; and having established themselves in the bay of Pichilingue, on the east coast of California, from which circumstance they received the name of “Pichilingues,” they caused great embarrassment to the Spanish viceroys from their proximity to the coasts of Mexico. To these adventurers the origin of the notion, that California was separated from the main land, has been referred by some authors; but Mr. Greenhow (p. 94) states, that it was to be traced to the captain of a Manilla ship, in 1620, who reported that the asserted river of D’Aguilar was the western mouth of a channel which separated the northern extremity of California from the main land. A survey of the lower part of the peninsula was executed by the Governor of Cinaloa, and the Jesuit Jacinto Cortes, in pursuance of the orders of the Duke of Escalona, who was Viceroy during 1610-42, about the very time when Fonte purported to have sailed. They did not, however, go to the head of the gulf; and Humboldt informs us, that, during the feeble reign of Charles II. of Spain, 1655-1700, several writers had begun to regard California as a cluster of large islands, under the name of “Islas Carolinas.” Thus we find in the maps of this period, in those for example of Sanson, Paris, 1650; of Du Val, geographer to the King of France, Abbeville, 1655; of Jenner, London, 1666; of De Wit, Amsterdam; of Vischer, Schenkius, Herman, Moll, and others, which are in the King’s Library at the British Museum, California is depicted as an island; and in Jenner’s Map, in which C. Blanco is the northernmost headland of California, there is this note:—“This California was in times past thought to have been a part of the continent, and so made in all maps; but, by further discoveries, was found to be an island, long 1700 leagues.”

On the other hand, the maps of the later part of the sixteenth, and the earlier part of the seventeenth centuries, such as those by Ortelius, the King of Spain’s geographer, published in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, first edited in 1570, the two maps adopted by Hakluyt in the respective editions of his voyages, in 1589 and 1600, that of Le Clerc, 1602, of Hondius, which Purchas adopted in his Pilgrims, in 1625, of Speed, 1646, and that of Blaew in his Novus Atlas of 1648, agree in representing California as a peninsula. The single passage, therefore, in De Fonte’s account, in which he, being “then admiral of New Spain and Peru, and now prince (or rather president) of Chili, explicitly states that he despatched one of his vessels, under the command of Don Diego Pennelosa, the nephew of Don Luis de Haro,” then great minister of Spain, “to discover whether California was an island or not, for before it was not known whether it was an island or a peninsula,” seems to point at once to the European origin of the tale. Mr. Dalrymple, the well-known secretary of the British Admiralty at the time of the Nootka Sound controversy, who was distinguished as the author of many able works on maritime discoveries, considered the story to have been a jeu-d’esprit of Mr. James Petiver the naturalist, one of the contributors to the Monthly Miscellany, whose taste for such subjects was evinced by his collection of MS. extracts, since preserved in the British Museum, and whose talent for such kind of composition was shown by his Account of a Voyage to the Levant, published in the same Miscellany. It is worthy of remark, that the tale of De Fuca and the letter of De Fonte, as they have derived their origin, so they have derived their support, from writers foreign to the nation in whose favour they set up the asserted discoveries, and from them alone. Maldonado, it is true, was a Spaniard, but he likewise has found defenders only amongst strangers, whilst in his own country his narrative has been condemned as an imposture by posterity equally as by his cotemporaries.

CHAPTER V.

THE CONVENTION OF THE ESCURIAL.

The King George’s Sound Company, in 1785.—Dixon and Portlock.—The Nootka and Sea Otter.—The Captain Cook and Experiment.—Expedition of Captain Hanna under the Portuguese Flag.—The Felice and Iphigenia.—The Princesa and San Carlos, in 1788.—Martinez and Haro directed to occupy Nootka in 1789.—The Princess Royal arrives at Nootka.—Colnett arrives in the Argonaut, July 2, 1789, with instructions to found a Factory.—He is seized, with his Vessel, by Martinez.—The Princess Royal also seized.—Both vessels sent as Prizes to San Blas.—The Columbia and Washington allowed to depart.—Representation of the Spanish Government to the Court of London.—British Reply.—Memorial of Captain Meares.—Message of the British Crown to Parliament.—British Note of May 5, 1790, to the Spanish Minister in London.—British Memorial of May 16.—Memorial of the Court of Spain, July 13.—Declaration of his Catholic Majesty to all the Courts of Europe.—Treaty of Utrecht.—Declaration and Counter declaration of July 4.—Spain demands aid from France, according to the Family Compact of 1761.—The National Assembly promotes a peaceful Adjustment of the Dispute.—Convention between Spain and Great Britain signed at the Escurial, Oct. 28, 1790.—Recognition of the Claims of Great Britain.

It has been already observed, that no British subject could trade to the west of Cape Horn without a licence from the South Sea Company, whilst, on the other hand, to the eastward of the Cape of Good Hope the East India Company possessed an exclusive monopoly of commerce. Thus the mercantile association which assumed the name of the King George’s Sound Company, and which despatched two vessels under Dixon and Portlock from England in the autumn of 1785, had found it necessary to obtain licences from the South Sea Company for them to proceed by way of Cape Horn, and they had likewise entered into an arrangement with the East India Company to carry their furs to Canton, and there exchange them for teas and other products of China, to be conveyed in their turn round the Cape of Good Hope to England. These vessels sailed under the British flag. With a similar object, two vessels, the Nootka, under Captain Meares, and the Sea Otter, under Captain Tipping, were, by an association under the patronage of the Governor General of India, early in 1786, despatched from Calcutta, under the flag of the English East India Company, whilst the Captain Cook and the Experiment sailed from Bombay for the same destination. An attempt, however, had been made by the British merchants in the preceding year, to organise a trade between North-west America and China, under the protection of the Portuguese flag, so as to evade the excessive harbour dues demanded by the Chinese authorities from other European nations, by means of licences granted by the Portuguese authorities at Macao. The first expedition of this kind was made by Captain Hanna, in 1785, and was most successful as a commercial speculation. In a similar manner, in 1788, some British merchants residing in India fitted out the Felice and Iphigenia for this trade, and through the interest of Juan Cavallo, a Portuguese merchant who had resided for many years at Bombay as a naturalised British subject, and traded from that place under the protection of the East India Company, obtained from the Governor of Macao permission for them to navigate under the Portuguese flag, if found convenient. Meares in his memorial states, that Cavallo merely lent his name to the firm, and that he had no real interest in the Iphigenia, as on his subsequent bankruptcy the claims of his creditors were successfully resisted, and the Iphigenia consequently lost the privileges which she had hitherto enjoyed in the ports of China, in her character of a Portuguese ship. On the other hand, in the obligation which Martinez exacted from the master and supercargo of the Iphigenia, Cavallo is spoken of as the lawful owner of the vessel in whose name they bound themselves. It is possible however that they may have bound the ostensible owner on purpose to defeat the object of the Spanish commander, instead of the real owners; and assuredly the instructions of the Merchant Proprietors to Captain Meares, “commanding the Felice and Iphigenia,” seem to be at variance with the fact of Cavallo being the real owner, as they are addressed to him evidently not in the mere character of supercargo, but as having the complete control of the vessels, which are expressly stated to have been fitted out and equipped by the Merchant Proprietors: and Meares is directed to defend his vessel against all attempts of Russian, English, or Spanish vessels to seize it; to protest, if captured, against the seizure of his vessel and cargo; and to take possession of any vessel that attacked him, as also her cargo, in case he should have the superiority in the conflict. (Appendix to Meares’ Voyage.)

To the same effect, the orders of Captain Meares to Captain Douglas, of the Iphigenia, seem to be conclusive that the latter had full control over the vessel. “Should you,” it is observed, “in the course of your voyage, meet with the vessels of any other nation, you will have as little communication with them as possible. If they be of superior force, and desire to see your papers, you will show them. You will, however, be on your guard against surprise. Should they be either Russian, English, Spanish, or any other civilised nation, and are authorised to examine your papers, you will permit them, and treat them with civility and friendship. But at the same time you must be on your guard. Should they attempt to seize you, or even carry you out of your way, you will prevent it by every means in your power, and repel force by force.”

Captain Douglas, moreover, was directed to note down the good behaviour of his officers and crew, and thus afford his employers a medium to distinguish merit from worthlessness. “This log-book,” they go on to state, “is to be signed by yourself. On your return to China you will seal up your log-book, charts, plans, &c., &c., and forward them to Daniel Beale, Esq., of Canton, who is the ostensible agent for the concern; and you have the most particular injunctions not to communicate or give copies of any charts or plans that you may make, as your employers assert a right to all of them, and as such will claim them.”

The person to whom such instructions were addressed must evidently have had the control of the vessel, and not been merely in charge of the cargo. It has been, however, rightly observed by Mr. Greenhow, that the papers on board the Iphigenia, when seized by Martinez, were written in the Portuguese language, which Captain Douglas did not understand, and therefore could not well act upon. The reply to this seems to be, that Douglas himself acted upon the letter of Captain Meares, inserted in the Appendix to Meares’ Voyages, which embodied in English the substance of the general instructions drawn up for the expedition in Portuguese; and that the ship’s papers were in the Portuguese language to support her assumed Portuguese character. There is no doubt that there was some deception in the transaction, but the deception seems to have been directed rather against the Chinese than the Spaniards.

Whatever may have been the character which was sought to be given to the Felice and Iphigenia, Meares appears on landing at Nootka to have avowed his British character, by hoisting British colours upon the house which he built on ground granted to him by Maquilla, the chief of the neighbouring district, as well as by displaying the English ensign on the vessel which he constructed and launched at Nootka. It was his intention to employ this vessel, a sloop of about forty tons, exclusively on the coast of America, in exploring new trading stations, and in collecting furs to be conveyed by the other vessels to the Chinese markets. It was named the North-west America, and was manned by a crew of seven British subjects and three natives of China.

Meares, having left the Iphigenia and North-west America to carry on the trade on the American coast, returned with a cargo of furs to Macao, in December 1788, and having there sold the Felice, associated himself with some merchants of London, who had embarked in this commerce under licences from the East India and South Sea Companies. Two of their vessels, under Dixon and Portlock, which have already been alluded to, the Prince of Wales and Princess Royal, had just arrived at Canton from the north-west coast of America. Meares, apprehending that mutual loss would result from competition, entered into a formal agreement with Mr. John Etches, the supercargo of the two ships, making a joint stock of all the vessels and property employed in that trade. The new firm immediately purchased an additional ship, named the Argonaut, and the Prince of Wales being chartered with a cargo of tea to England by the East India Company, the Princess Royal and the Argonaut were ordered to sail to Nootka Sound under the command of Captain Colnett and Captain Hudson. It is indisputable that these vessels were sailing under the British flag, and from the instructions delivered to Captain Colnett, the Iphigenia and North-west America were henceforward to be under his orders, and to trade on account of the Company. He was accordingly directed to send home Captain Douglas in the Argonaut, and to receive from him the Iphigenia and North-west America, shifting their crews, &c.

“We also authorise you,” the instructions go on to state, “to dismiss from your service all persons who shall refuse to obey your orders, when they are for our benefit, and in this case we give you to understand, the Princess Royal, America, and other small craft, are always to continue on the coast of America. Their officers and people, when the time of their service is up, must be embarked in the returning ship to China, and on no account whatever will we suffer a deviation from these orders.”

Thenceforward, it appears, that the Iphigenia and North-west America would be considered as sailing under the same character as the other vessels of this Company.

The steady advance of the Russian establishments along the north-west shores of the Pacific, which had become notorious from the publication of Captain Cook’s journals, could not but cause great anxiety to the Spanish government. An expedition of inquiry was in consequence sent northward from the port of San Blas in 1788, consisting of two vessels, the Princesa and San Carlos, under the command of Esteban José Martinez and Gonzalo Lopez de Haro. They were instructed to proceed directly to Prince William’s Sound, and to visit the various factories of the Russians in that neighbourhood. Having executed their commission, they returned to San Blas in the autumn of the same year, and reported the results of their voyage to the Viceroy of Mexico. Martinez brought back the information that it was the intention of the Russians to found a settlement at Nootka. The Court of Madrid in consequence addressed a remonstrance to the Emperor of Russia against the encroachments upon the territories of his Catholic Majesty, which were assumed to extend northward up to Prince William’s Sound, and the Viceroy of Mexico in the mean time took measures to prevent the execution of any such schemes. With this object he despatched Martinez and Haro in 1789, with instructions to occupy the port of Nootka by right of the prior discovery of Perez in 1774, to treat any Russian or English vessels that might be there with the courtesy which the amicable relations between the several nations required, but to manifest to them the paramount rights of Spain to make establishments there, and by inference to prevent all foreign establishments which might be prejudicial to Spanish interests.

The Princesa sailed into Nootka Sound on the 6th of May 1789, and found the Iphigenia at Friendly Cove. The San Carlos joined her consort on the 13th. The Columbia merchantman, of the United States of America, was lying at anchor at no great distance. Mutual civilities passed between the different vessels till the 15th, when Martinez took possession of the Iphigenia, and transferred her captain and crew as prisoners to his own vessels. He subsequently allowed the Iphigenia to depart, upon an obligation being signed by the captain and supercargo on behalf of Juan Cavallo of Macao, as the owner, to satisfy all demands, in case the Viceroy of Spain should pronounce her to be a prize, on account of navigating or anchoring in seas or ports belonging to the dominion of his Catholic Majesty without his permission. Captain Kendrick of the Columbia, and Ingraham his first pilot, were called in to witness this agreement. The Iphigenia was released on the 1st of June, and sailed away directly to Queen Charlotte’s Island. On the 8th, the North-west America arrived from a trading voyage along the southern coasts, and was immediately taken possession of by Martinez. A few days afterwards the Princess Royal arrived from Macao, bringing intelligence of the failure of the house of Cavallo, in consequence of which Martinez hoisted Spanish colours on board of the North-west America, and employed her to trade along the coast upon his own account.

The Princess Royal was not however molested by him, but, on the 2d of July, her consort the Argonaut arrived with Captain Colnett, who, upon hearing of the treatment of the Iphigenia and the North-west America, hesitated at first to enter the Sound. His instructions were to found a factory, to be called Fort Pitt, in the most convenient station which he might select, for the purpose of a permanent settlement, and as a centre of trade, round which other stations might be established. Having at last entered the Sound, he was invited to go on board the Princesa, where an altercation ensued between Martinez and himself, in respect of his object in visiting Nootka, the result of which was the arrest of Colnett himself and the seizure of the Argonaut. Her consort the Princess Royal on her return to Nootka on the 13th of July, was seized in like manner by the Spanish commander. Both these vessels were sent as prizes to San Blas, according to Captain Meares’ memorial. The Columbia in the mean while had been allowed to depart unmolested, and her consort the Washington, which had been trading along the coast, soon followed her.

Such is a brief summary of the transactions at Nootka Sound in the course of 1789, which led to the important political discussions, that terminated in the convention of the 28th of Oct. 1790, signed at the Escurial. By this convention the future relations of Spain and Great Britain in respect of trade and settlements on the north-west coast of America, were amicably arranged.

Immediately upon receiving information of these transactions from the Viceroy, the Spanish Government hastened to communicate to the Court of London the seizure of a British vessel, (the Argonaut,) and to remonstrate against the attempts of British subjects to make settlements in territories long occupied and frequented by the Spaniards, and against their encroachments on the exclusive rights of Spain to the fisheries in the South Seas, as guaranteed by Great Britain at the treaty of Utrecht. The British Ministry in reply demanded the immediate restoration of the vessel seized, as preliminary to any discussion as to the claims of Spain. The Spanish Cabinet in answer to this demand stated, that as the Viceroy of Mexico had released the vessel, his Catholic Majesty considered that affair as concluded, without discussing the undoubted rights of Spain to the exclusive sovereignty, navigation, and commerce in the territories, coasts, and seas, in that part of the world, and that he should be satisfied with Great Britain directing her subjects to respect those rights in future. At this juncture, Meares, who had received from the Columbia, on her arrival at Macao, the tidings of the seizure of the North-west America, whose crew returned as passengers in the Columbia, as well as of the Argonaut and the Princess Royal, arrived at London with the necessary documents to lay before the British Government. A full memorial of the transactions at Nootka Sound in 1789, including an account of the earlier commercial voyages of the Nootka and the Felice, was presented to the House of Commons on May 13, 1790. It is published in full in the appendix to Meares’ Voyages, and the substance of it may be found amongst the state papers in the Annual Register for 1790. This was followed by a message from his Majesty to both Houses of Parliament on May 25th, stating that “two vessels belonging to his Majesty’s subjects, and navigated under the British flag, and two others, of which the description had not been hitherto sufficiently ascertained, had been captured at Nootka Sound by an officer commanding two Spanish ships of war.” Having alluded to the substance of the communications which had passed between the two Governments, and to the British minister having been directed to make a fresh representation, and to claim full and adequate satisfaction, the message concluded with recommending that “such measures should be adopted as would enable his Majesty to support the honour of his crown and the interests of his people.” The House of Commons gave their full assent to these recommendations, and readily voted the necessary supplies, so that preparations to maintain the rights of Great Britain by arms were immediately commenced. In the mean time a note had been addressed on May 5th, to the Spanish minister in London, to the effect that his Majesty the King of England would take effectual measures to prevent his subjects from acting against the just and acknowledged rights of Spain, but that he could not accede to her pretensions of absolute sovereignty, commerce, and navigation, and that he should consider it his duty to protect his subjects in the enjoyments of the right of fishery in the Pacific Ocean. In accordance with the foregoing answers, the British chargé-d’affaires at Madrid made a demand, on May 16th, for the restitution of the Princess Royal, and for reparation proportionate to the losses and injuries sustained by English subjects trading under the British flag. He further asserted for them “an indisputable right to the enjoyment of a free and uninterrupted navigation, commerce, and fishery, and to the possession of such establishments as they should form with the consent of the natives of the country, not previously occupied by any of the European nations.” The substance of these communications was embodied in the memorial of the Court of Spain, delivered on June 13th to the British ambassador at Madrid. It appeared, however, from a subsequent reply from the Spanish minister, the Conde de Florida Blanca, that Spain maintained, “that the detention of the vessels was made in a port, upon a coast, or in a bay of Spanish America, the commerce or navigation of which belonged exclusively to Spain by treaties with all nations, even England herself.” The nature of these exclusive claims of Spain had been already notified to all the courts of Europe, in a declaration made by his Catholic Majesty on June 4th, where the words are made use of, “in the name of the King, his sovereignty, navigation, and exclusive commerce to the continent and islands of the South Sea, it is the manner in which Spain, in speaking of the Indies, has always used these words: that is to say, to the Continent, islands and seas, which belong to his Majesty, so far as discoveries have been made, and secured to him by treaties and immemorial possession, and uniformly acquiesced in, notwithstanding some infringements by individuals, who have been punished upon knowledge of their offences. And the King sets up no pretensions to any possessions, the right to which he cannot prove by irrefragable titles.”

What were the treaties and immemorial possession upon which Spain rested her claims, was more explicitly stated in the Spanish Memorial of the 13th June. The chief reliance seemed to have been placed upon the 8th article of the Treaty of Utrecht, as concluded between Great Britain and Spain in 1713, by which it was agreed, that the exercise of navigation and commerce to the Spanish West Indies should remain in the same state in which it was in the time of Charles II. of Spain; that no permission should at any time be given to any nation, under any pretext whatever, to trade into the dominions subject to the Crown of Spain in America, excepting as already specially provided for by treaties: moreover, Great Britain undertook “to aid and assist the Spaniards in re-establishing the ancient limits of their dominions in the West Indies, in the exact situation in which they had been in the time of Charles II.” The extent of the Spanish territories, commerce, and dominions on the continent of America was further alleged in this memorial to have been clearly laid down and authenticated by a variety of documents and formal acts of possession about the year 1692, in the reign of the above-mentioned monarch: all attempted usurpations since that period had been successfully resisted, and reiterated acts of taking possession by Spanish vessels, had preserved the rights of Spain to her dominions, which she had extended to the limits of the Russian establishments within Prince William’s Sound. It was still further alleged, that the Viceroys of Peru and New Spain had of late directed the western coasts of America, and the islands and seas adjacent, to be more frequently explored, in order to check the growing increase of smuggling, and that it was in one of the usual tours of inspection of the coasts of California that the commanding officer of a Spanish ship had detained the English vessels in Nootka Sound, as having arrived there, not for the purposes of trade, but with the object of “founding a settlement and fortifying it.”

From these negotiations it would appear, that Spain claimed for herself an exclusive title to the entire north-western coast of America, up to Prince William’s Sound, as having been discovered by her, and such discovery having been secured to her by treaties, and repeated acts of taking possession. She consequently denied the right of any other nation (for almost all the nations of Europe had been parties to the Treaty of Utrecht) to make establishments within the limits of Spanish America. Great Britain, on the other hand, maintained her right “to a free and undisturbed navigation, commerce, and fishery, and to the possession of any establishment which she might form with the consent of the natives of the country, where such country was not previously occupied by any of the European nations.” These may be considered to have been the two questions at issue between Great Britain and Spain, which were set at rest by the subsequent convention.

That such was the object of the convention, is evident from the tenor of two documents exchanged between the two courts on the 24th of July, 1790, the first of which contained a declaration, on the part of his Catholic Majesty, of his engagement to make full restitution of all the British vessels which were captured at Nootka, and to indemnify the parties with an understanding that it should not prejudice “the ulterior discussion of any right which his Majesty might claim to form an exclusive establishment at the port of Nootka;” whilst on the part of his Britannic Majesty a counter-declaration was issued, accepting the declaration of his Catholic Majesty, together with the performance of the engagements contained therein, as a full and entire satisfaction for the injury of which his Majesty complained; with the reservation that neither the declaration nor its acceptance “shall prejudice in any respect the right which his Majesty might claim to any establishment which his subjects might have formed, or should be desirous of forming in future, in the said Bay of Nootka.” Mr. Greenhow’s mode of stating the substance of these papers (p. 206) is calculated to give an erroneous notion of the state in which they left the question. He adds, “it being, however, at the same time admitted and expressed on both sides, that the Spanish declaration was not to preclude or prejudice the ulterior discussion of any right which his Catholic Majesty might claim to form an exclusive establishment at Nootka Sound.” This is not a correct statement of the transaction, as the reservation was expressed in the declaration of his Catholic Majesty; but so far was his Britannic Majesty from admitting it in the counter-declaration, that he met it directly with a special reservation of the rights of his own subjects, as already set forth.

Had the crown of Spain been able to rely upon assistance from France, in accordance with the treaty of 1761, known as the Family Compact, there can be no doubt that she would have attempted to maintain by arms her claim of exclusive sovereignty over “all the coast to the north of Western America on the side of the South Sea, as far as beyond what is called Prince William’s Sound, which is in the sixty-first degree;” but her formal application for assistance was not attended with the result which the mutual engagements of the two crowns would have secured at an earlier period. The National Assembly, to which body Louis XVI. was obliged, under the altered state of political circumstances in France, to submit the letter of the King of Spain, was rather disposed to avail itself of the opportunity which seemed to present itself for substituting a national treaty between the two nations for the Family Compact between the two Courts; and though it decreed that the naval armaments of France should be increased in accordance with the increased armaments of other European powers, it made no direct promise of assistance to Spain. On the contrary, the Diplomatic Committee of the National Assembly resolved rather to strengthen the relations of France with England, and to prevent a war, if possible; and with this object they co-operated with the agent of Mr. Pitt in Paris (Tomline’s Life of Pitt, c. xii.) and with M. de Montmorenci, the French Secretary for Foreign Affairs, in furthering the peaceable adjustment of the questions in dispute.

Convention between His Britannic Majesty and the King of Spain, signed at the Escurial the 28th of October, 1790. (Annual Register, 1790, p. 303. Martens, Recueil de Traités, t. iv., p. 493.)

“Their Britannic and Catholic Majesties, being desirous of terminating, by a speedy and solid agreement, the differences which have lately arisen between the two crowns, have judged that the best way of attaining this salutary object would be that of an amicable arrangement, which, setting aside all retrospective discussion of the rights and pretensions of the two parties, should fix their respective situation for the future on a basis conformable to their true interests, as well as to the mutual desire with which their said Majesties are animated, of establishing with each other, in every thing and in all places, the most perfect friendship, harmony, and good correspondence. In this view, they have named and constituted for their plenipotentiaries; to wit, on the part of his Britannic Majesty, Alleyne Fitz-Herbert, Esq., one of his said Majesty’s Privy Council in Great Britain and Ireland, and his Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to his Catholic Majesty; and, on the part of his Catholic Majesty, Don Joseph Monino, Count of Florida Blanca, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Spanish Order of Charles III., Councillor of State to his said Majesty, and his Principal Secretary of State, and of the Despatches; who, after having communicated to each other their respective full powers, have agreed upon the following articles:—

“Art. I. It is agreed that the buildings and tracts of land situated on the north-west coast of the continent of North America, or on islands adjacent to that continent, of which the subjects of his Britannic Majesty were dispossessed, about the month of April, 1789, by a Spanish officer, shall be restored to the said Britannic subjects.

“Art. II. And further, that a just reparation shall be made, according to the nature of the case, for all acts of violence or hostility which may have been committed, subsequent to the month of April, 1789, by the subjects of either of the contracting parties against the subjects of the other; and that, in case any of the said respective subjects shall, since the same period, have been forcibly dispossessed of their lands, buildings, vessels, merchandise, or other property whatever, on the said continent, or on the seas or islands adjacent, they shall be re-established in the possession thereof, or a just compensation shall be made to them for the losses which they shall have sustained.

“Art. III. And in order to strengthen the bonds of friendship, and to preserve in future a perfect harmony and good understanding between the two contracting parties, it is agreed that their respective subjects shall not be disturbed or molested, either in navigating or carrying on their fisheries in the Pacific Ocean, or in the South Seas, or in landing on the coasts of those seas, in places not already occupied, for the purpose of carrying on their commerce with the natives of the country, or of making settlements there; the whole subject, nevertheless, to the restrictions and provisions specified in the three following articles.

“Art. IV. His Britannic Majesty engages to take the most effectual measures to prevent the navigation and fishery of his subjects in the Pacific Ocean, or in the South Seas, from being made a pretext for illicit trade with the Spanish settlements; and with this view, it is moreover expressly stipulated, that British subjects shall not navigate, or carry on their fishery in the said seas, within the space of ten sea leagues from any part of the coasts already occupied by Spain.

“Art. V. It is agreed, that as well in the places which are to be restored to the British subjects, by virtue of the first article, as in all other parts of the north-western coasts of North America, or of the islands adjacent, situated to the north of the parts of the said coast already occupied by Spain, wherever the subjects of either of the two powers shall have made settlements since the month of April, 1789, or shall hereafter make any, the subjects of the other shall have free access, and shall carry on their trade, without any disturbance or molestation.

“Art. VI. It is further agreed, with respect to the eastern and western coasts of South America, and to the islands adjacent, that no settlement shall be formed hereafter, by the respective subjects, in such parts of those coasts as are situated to the south of those parts of the same coasts and of the islands adjacent, which are already occupied by Spain: provided that the said respective subjects shall retain the liberty of landing on the coasts and islands so situated, for the purposes of their fishery, and of erecting thereon huts, and other temporary buildings, serving only for those purposes.

“Art. VII. In all cases of complaint or infraction of the articles of the present convention, the officers of either party, without permitting themselves previously to commit any violence or act of force, shall be bound to make an exact report of the affair, and of its circumstances, to their respective courts, who will terminate such differences in an amicable manner.

“Art. VIII. The present convention shall be ratified and confirmed in the space of six weeks, to be computed from the day of its signature, or sooner, if it can be done.

“In witness whereof, we the undersigned Plenipotentiaries of their Britannic and Catholic Majesties, have, in their names, and in virtue of our respective full powers, signed the present convention, and set thereto the seals of our arms.

“Done at the Palace of St. Laurence, the twenty-eighth of October, one thousand seven hundred and ninety.

“Alleyne Fitz-Herbert.
(L. S.)
“El Conde de Florida Blanca.”
(L. S.)

On examining this convention, it will be seen that the first article confirmed the positive engagement which his Catholic Majesty had contracted by his declaration of the 24th July: that the second contained an engagement for both parties to make reparation mutually for any contingent acts of violence or hostility: that the third defined for the future the mutual rights of the two contracting parties, in respect to the questions which remained in dispute after the exchange of the declaration and counter-declaration. By this article the navigation and fisheries of the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas were declared to be free to the subjects of the two crowns, and their mutual right of trading with the natives on the coast, and of making settlements in places not already occupied, was fully recognised, subject to certain restrictions in the following articles.

By the fourth of these, his Britannic Majesty bound himself to prevent his subjects carrying on an illicit trade with the Spanish settlements, and engaged that they should not approach within ten miles of the coasts already occupied by Spain.

By the fifth it was agreed that, in the places to be restored to the British, and in whatever parts of the north-western coasts of America, or the adjacent islands, situate to the north of the parts already occupied by Spain, the subjects of either power should make settlements, the subjects of the other should have free commercial access.

By the sixth it was agreed, that no settlements should be made by either power on the eastern and western coasts of South America, or the adjacent islands, south of the parts already occupied by Spain; but that they should be open to the temporary occupation of the subjects of either power, for the purposes of their fishery.

By the seventh, provisions were made for the amicable arrangement of any differences which might arise from infringements of the convention; and, by the eighth, the time of ratification was settled.

It thus appears that, by the third article, the right insisted upon by the British chargé-d’affaires at Madrid, in the Memorial of the 16th of May, was fully acknowledged; namely, “the indisputable right to the enjoyment of a free and uninterrupted navigation, commerce, and fishery, and to the possession of such establishments as they should form, with the consent of the natives of the country, not previously occupied by any of the European nations.” In accordance with this view, it is observed in Schoell’s Histoire Abrégée des Traités de Paix: “En conséquence il fut signé le 28 Octobre, au palais de l’Escurial, une convention par laquelle la question litigieuse fut entièrement décidée en faveur de la Grande Bretagne.”

Thus, indeed, after a struggle of more than two hundred years, the principles which Great Britain had asserted in the reign of Elizabeth, were at last recognised by Spain: the unlimited pretensions of the Spanish crown to exclusive dominion in the Western Indies, founded upon the bull of Alexander VI., were restrained within definite limits; and occupation, or actual possession, was acknowledged to be henceforward the only test between the two crowns, in respect to each other, of territorial title on the west coast of North America.

Mr. Greenhow states, (p. 215,) that both parties were, by the convention, equally excluded from settling in the vacant coasts of South America; and from exercising that jurisdiction which is essential to political sovereignty, over any spot north of the most northern Spanish settlement in the Pacific. The former part of this statement is perfectly correct, but the latter is questionable, in the form in which it is set forth. The right of trading with the natives, or of making settlements in places not already occupied, was secured to both parties by the third article: whereas, in places where the subjects of either power should have made settlements, free access for carrying on their trade was all that was guaranteed to the subjects of the other party. This then was merely a commercial privilege, not inconsistent with that territorial sovereignty, which, by the practice of nations, would attend upon the occupation or actual possession of lands hitherto vacant. In fact, when Mr. Greenhow observes, in continuation, that “the convention determined nothing regarding the rights of either to the sovereignty of any portion of America, except so far as it may imply an abrogation, or rather suspension of all such claims on both sides, to any of those coasts;” he negatives his previous supposition that the convention precluded the acquisition of territorial sovereignty by either party. The general law of nations would regulate this question, if the convention determined nothing: and, by that general law, “when a nation takes possession of a country to which no prior owner can lay claim, it is considered as acquiring the empire or sovereignty of it at the same time with the domain.” The discussion of this question, however, as being one of law, not of fact, will be more properly deferred.

One object of Vancouver’s mission, as already observed, was to receive from the Spanish officers such lands or buildings as were to be restored to the subjects of his Britannic Majesty, in conformity to the first article of the convention, and instructions were forwarded to him, after his departure, through Lieutenant Hergest, in the Dædalus, to that effect. The letter of Count Florida Blanca to the commandant at Nootka, which Lieutenant Hergest carried out with him, is to be found in the Introduction to Vancouver’s Voyage, p. xxvii. “In conformity to the first article of the convention of 28th October, 1790, between our Court and that of London, ( . . . . . ) you will give directions that his Britannic Majesty’s officer, who shall deliver this letter, shall immediately be put into possession of the buildings, and districts or parcels of land, which were occupied by the subjects of that sovereign in April 1789, as well in the port of Nootka or of St. Lawrence, as in the other, said to be called Port Cox, and to be situated about sixteen leagues distant from the former, to the southward; and that such parcels or districts of land of which the English subjects were dispossessed, be restored to the said officer, in case the Spaniards should not have given them up.”

Vancouver, however, on his arrival, found himself unable to acquiesce in the terms proposed by Señor Quadra, the Spanish commandant, and despatched Lieutenant Mudge, by way of China, to England, for more explicit instructions. Lieutenant Broughton was subsequently directed to proceed home in 1793, with a similar object. On his arrival he was sent by the British Government to Madrid; and on his return to London, was ordered to proceed to Nootka, as captain of his Majesty’s sloop Providence, with Mr. Mudge as his first lieutenant, to receive possession of the territories to be restored to the British, in case they should not have been previously given up. His own account, published in his Voyage, p. 50, is unfortunately meagre in the extreme. On 17th March, 1796, he anchored in the Sound, where Maquinna and another chief brought him several letters, dated March, 1795, which informed him “that Captain Vancouver sailed from Monterey the 1st December, 1794, for England, and that the Spaniards had delivered up the port of Nootka, &c., to Lieutenant Pierce of the marines, agreeably to the mode of restitution settled between the two Courts. A letter from the Spanish officer, Brigadier Alava, informed him of their sailing, in March, 1795, from thence.”

It is evidently to this transaction that Schoell, in his edition of Koch’s Histoire Abrégée des Traités de Paix, t. i., ch. xxiv., refers, when he writes,—“L’exécution de la Convention du 28 Octobre 1790, éprouva, du reste, des difficultés qui la retardèrent jusqu’en 1795. Elles furent terminées le 23 Mars de cette année, sur les lieux mêmes, par le brigadier Espagnol Alava, et le lieutenant Anglais Poara, (Pierce?) qui échangèrent des déclarations dans le golfe de Nootka même. Après que le fort Espagnol fut rasé, les Espagnols s’embarquèrent, et le pavillon Anglais y fut planté en signe de possession.” M. Koch does not give his authority, but it was most probably Spanish, from the modification which the name of the British lieutenant has undergone. On the other hand, Mr. Greenhow cites a passage from Belsham’s History of England, to this effect:—“It is nevertheless certain, from the most authentic information, that the Spanish flag flying at Nootka was never struck, and that the territory has been virtually relinquished by Great Britain.” It ought, however, to have been stated, that this remark occurs in a note to Belsham’s work, without any clew to the authentic information on which he professed to rely, and with a special reference to a work of no authority—L’Histoire de Fréderic-Guillaume II., Roi de Prusse, par le Comte de Ségur;—in which it is stated, that the determination of the French Convention to maintain at all risk the Family Compact, intimidated Great Britain into being satisfied with the mere restitution of the vessels which had been captured with her subjects, while engaged in a contraband trade with the Spanish settlements! It further appears from an official Spanish paper, to which Mr. Greenhow alludes in a note (p. 257,) as existing in the library of Congress at Washington, intitled “Instruccion reservada del Reyno de Nueva España, que el Exmo Señor Virey Conde de Revillagigedo diò à su sucesor el Exmo Señor Marques de Branciforte, en el año de 1704,” that orders had been sent to the commandant at Nootka to abandon the place, agreeably to a royal dictamen. The negative remark, therefore, of Mr. Belsham, cannot disprove the fact of the restitution of Nootka to the British, against the positive statements of so many high authorities: it may, indeed, be conclusive of his own ignorance of the fact, and so far his integrity may remain unimpeached; but it must be at the expense of his character for accurate research and careful statement—the most valuable, as well as the most necessary qualifications of a writer of history.

M. Duflot de Mofras, in his recent work, intitled, “Exploration du Territoire de l’Orégon,” tom. ii., p. 145, further states, that Lieutenant Pierce passed through Mexico. “Par suite de quelques fausses interprétations du traité de 28 Oct. 1790, les Espagnols ne remirent point immédiatement Nootka aux Anglais, et ce ne fut qu’en Mars 1795, que le commandant Espagnol opéra cette cession entre les mains du Lieutenant Pierce, de l’infanterie de marine Anglaise, venu tout exprès de Londres par le Mexique, pour hâter l’exécution du traité de l’Escurial.”

CHAPTER VI.

THE OREGON OR COLUMBIA RIVER.

The Oregon, or Great River of the West, discovered by D. Bruno Heceta, in 1775. Ensenada de Heceta.—Rio de San Roque.—Meares’ Voyage in the Felice, in 1788.—Deception Bay.—Vancouver’s Mission in 1791.—Vancouver vindicated against Mr. Greenhow in respect to Cape Orford.—Vancouver passes through Deception Bay.—Meets Captain Gray in the Merchant-ship Columbia.—Gray passes the Bar of the Oregon, and gives it the Name of the Columbia River.—Extract from the Log-book of the Columbia.—Vancouver defended.—The Chatham crosses the Bar, and finds the Schooner Jenny, from Bristol, inside.—The Discovery driven out to Sea.—Lieutenant Broughton ascends the River with his Boats, 110 miles from its Mouth.—Point Vancouver.—The Cascades—The Dalles.—The Chutes or Falls of the Columbia.—Mr. Greenhow’s Criticism of Lieutenant Broughton’s Nomenclature.—Lord Stowell’s Definition of the Mouth of a River.—Extent of Gray’s Researches.—The Discovery of the Columbia River a progressive Discovery.—Doctrine as to the Discovery of a River, set up by the United States, denied by Great Britain.

It is generally admitted that the first discovery of the locality where the Oregon or Great River of the West emptied itself into the sea, was made in 1775, by D. Bruno Heceta, as he was coasting homewards to Monterey, having parted with his companion Bodega in about the 50th degree of north latitude. We find in consequence that in the charts published at Mexico soon after his return, the inlet, which he named Ensenada de la Asuncion, is called Ensenada de Heceta, and the river which was supposed to empty itself there, is marked as the Rio de San Roque. The discovery however of this river by Heceta was certainly the veriest shadow of a discovery, as will be evident from his own report, which Mr. Greenhow has annexed in the Appendix to his work. Having stated that on the 17th of August he discovered a large bay, to which he gave the name of the Bay of the Assumption, in about 46° 17′ N. L., he proceeds to say, that having placed his ship nearly midway between the two capes which formed the extremities of the bay, he found the currents and eddies too strong for his vessel to contend with in safety. “These currents and eddies of water caused me to believe that the place is the mouth of some great river, or of some passage into another sea.” In fact, Heceta did not ascertain that the water of this current was not sea-water, and as he himself says, had little difficulty in conceiving that the inlet might be the same with the passage mentioned by De Fuca, since he was satisfied no such straits as those described by De Fuca existed between 47° and 48°.

Although, however, the discovery of this river was so essentially imperfect, being attended by no exploration, as hardly to warrant the admission of it into charts which professed to be well authenticated, still its existence was believed upon the evidence which Heceta’s report furnished, and as subsequent examination has confirmed its existence, the Spaniards seem warranted in claiming the credit of the discovery for their countryman.

No further notice of this supposed river occurs until Meares’ voyage in the Felice, in 1788. Meares, according to his published narrative, reached the bay of the river on July 6th, and steered into it, with every expectation of finding there, according to the Spanish accounts, a good port. In this hope, however, he was disappointed, as breakers were observed, as he approached, extending across the bay. He in consequence gave to the northern headland the name of Cape Disappointment, and to the bay itself the title of Deception Bay. “We can now with safety assert,” he writes, “that no such river as that of Saint Roc exists, as laid down in the Spanish charts.” Meares had been led from these charts to expect that he should find a place of shelter for his ship at the mouth of this river, and Heceta, in his plan, upon which the Spanish charts were based, had supposed that there was a port there formed by an island: so that, as “it blew very strong in the offing, and a great westerly swell tumbled in on the land,” it was not surprising that Meares should have concluded, from there being no opening in the breakers, that there was no such port, and therefore no such river.

There can be no doubt that the locality of the bay which Meares reconnoitred was the locality of the Ensenada de Heceta; and on the other hand it cannot be gainsayed, that Meares was right in concluding that there was no such river as that of St. Roque, as laid down in the Spanish charts, for the context of Meares’ narrative explains the meaning of the word “such.” Meares states beforehand, that they were in expectation that the distant land beyond the promontory would prove to be “the Cape St. Roque of the Spaniards, near which they were said to have found a good port.” The river, then, of St. Roque, such as it was laid down in Spanish charts, was a river “near which was a good port,” and the disappointment which Meares handed down to posterity by the name which he gave to the promontory, was that of not obtaining a place of shelter for his vessel. Meares, it must be remembered, was not in search of the Straits of Anian. He had already in the previous month of June ascertained the existence of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, which he supposed might be one of the passages into Hudson’s Bay: but he was in search of some harbour or port, where the ship could remain in safety, while the boats might be employed in exploring the coast. (Voyage, p. 166.) Such a harbour indeed Deception Bay most assuredly does not supply, and though Baker’s Bay within the bar of the river affords on the north side a good and secure anchorage, yet, as Lieut. Broughton subsequently ascertained, “the heavy and confused swell that rolls in over the shallow entrance, and breaks in three fathoms water, renders the place between Baker’s Bay and Chinock Point a very indifferent roadstead.”

Mr. Greenhow, (p. 177,) in his observations on Meares’ voyage, writes thus: “Yet, strange though it may appear, the commissioners appointed by the British Government in 1826, to treat with the plenipotentiary of the United States at London, on the subject of the claims of the respective parties to territories on the northwest side of America, insisted that Meares on this occasion discovered the Great River Columbia, which actually enters the Pacific at Deception Bay, and cite, in proof of their assertion, the very parts of the narrative above extracted,” the substance of which has just been referred to. Mr. Greenhow, however, has attached rather too great an extent to the statement of the British commissioners, which is annexed to the protocol of the sixth conference, held at London, Dec. 16th, 1826. The documents relative to this negotiation have not as yet been published by the British Government, but they were made known to the Congress of the United States, with the message of President Adams, on Dec. 12, 1827, and Mr. Greenhow has annexed the British statement in his Appendix.

“Great Britain,” it is there said, “can show that in 1788, that is, four years before Gray entered the mouth of the Columbia river, Mr. Meares, a lieutenant of the Royal Navy, who had been sent by the East India Company on a trading expedition to the northwest coast of America, had already minutely explored the coast from the 49th to the 45th degree of north latitude; had taken formal possession of the Straits of De Fuca in the name of his sovereign; had purchased land, trafficked and formed treaties with the natives; and had actually entered the bay of the Columbia, to the north headland of which he gave the name of Cape Disappointment, a name which it bears to this day.”

The language of this statement, it will be seen, is carefully worded, so as not to go beyond the actual facts narrated in Meares’ Voyage; and further, on referring to the maps of the coasts and harbours which he visited, it continues, “in which every part of the coast in question, including the Bay of the Columbia (into which the log expressly states that Meares entered,) is minutely laid down, its delineation tallying in almost every particular with Vancouver’s subsequent survey, and with the description found in all the best maps of that part of the world adopted at this moment.”

The entry in Meares’ log-book is as follows: “July 6, lat. 46° 10′; long. 235° 24′; northerly; strong gales, a great sea. Passed Cape Disappointment, into Deception Bay, and hauled out again, and passed Quicksand Bay, Cape Grenville, and Cape Look-out.”

There is, therefore, nothing strange in the view which the British Commissioners really insisted upon, though it is strange that Mr. Greenhow should have misconstrued their statement, particularly as, in a paragraph almost immediately following, which will be referred to in full in its proper place, they readily admit that Mr. Gray, four years afterwards, “was the first to ascertain that this bay formed the outlet of a great river.”

The further examination of these coasts by British subjects was suspended for a short time, as already seen, by the interference of the Spanish authorities. After, however, that Spain had definitively abandoned her pretensions to exclusive rights along the entire northwest coast of America, as far as Prince William’s Sound, and agreed, by the third article of the Convention of 1790, that occupation should be the test of territorial title, the British Government judged it expedient “to ascertain with as much precision as possible the number, extent, and situation of any settlement which had been made within the limits of 60° and 30° north latitude by any European nation, and the time when such settlement was made. With this object, amongst others more immediately connected with the execution of the first article of the Convention, Captain George Vancouver was despatched from Deptford with two vessels on January 6, 1791, and having wintered at the Sandwich Islands, where he was instructed to wait for further orders in reference to the restoration of the buildings and tracts of land, of which British subjects had been dispossessed at Nootka, he arrived off the coast of America on April 17, 1792, in about 39° 30′. He had received special instructions to ascertain the direction and extent of all such considerable inlets, whether made by arms of the sea, or by the mouths of great rivers, which might be likely to lead to, or facilitate in any considerable degree, an intercourse, for the purposes of commerce, between the northwest coast and the country upon the opposite side of the continent, which are inhabited or occupied by his Majesty’s subjects;” but he was expressly required and directed “not to pursue any inlet or river further than it should appear to be navigable by vessels of such burden as might safely navigate the Pacific Ocean.” (Introduction to Vancouver’s Voyage, p. xix.)

Having made a headland, which he supposed to be Cape Mendocino, Vancouver directed his course northward, examining carefully the line of coast, and taking soundings as he proceeded. In about latitude 42° 52′, longitude 235° 35′, he remarked a low projecting headland, apparently composed of black craggy rocks in the space between the woods and the wash of the sea, and covered with wood nearly to the edge of the surf, which, as forming a very conspicuous point, he distinguished by the name of Cape Orford. Mr. Greenhow has allowed his antipathy to Vancouver to lead him into an erroneous statement in respect to this headland. Vancouver (Vol. i., p. 205, April 25, 1792) writes: “Some of us were of opinion that this was the Cape Blanco of Martin d’Aguilar; its latitude, however, differed greatly from that in which Cape Blanco is placed by that navigator; and its dark appearance, which might probably be occasioned by the haziness of the weather, did not seem to entitle it to the appellation of Cape Blanco.” He afterwards goes on to say, that at noon, when Cape Orford was visible astern, nearly in the horizon, they had a projecting headland in sight on the westward, which he considered to be Cape Blanco. He here ranged along the coast, at the distance of about a league, in hope of discovering the asserted river of D’Aguilar. “About three in the afternoon, we passed within a league of the cape above mentioned, and at about half that distance from some breakers that lie to the westward of it. This cape, though not so projecting a point as Cape Orford, is nevertheless a conspicuous one, particularly when seen from the north, being formed by a round hill, on high perpendicular cliffs, some of which are white, a considerable height from the level of the sea.” It appeared to Vancouver to correspond in several of its features with Captain Cook’s description of Cape Gregory, though its latitude, which he determined to be 43° 23′, did not agree with that assigned by Captain Cook to that headland; but he again states, that there was a “probability of its being also the Cape Blanco of D’Aguilar, if land hereabouts the latter ever saw;” and that “a compact white sandy beach commenced, where the rocky cliffs composing it terminate.”

Mr. Greenhow remarks: “Near the 43d degree of latitude, they sought in vain for the river, which Martin d’Aguilar was said to have seen, entering the Pacific thereabouts, in 1603: and they appeared inclined to admit as identical with the Cape Blanco of that navigator, a high, whitish promontory, in the latitude of 42° 52′, to which, however, they did not scruple to assign the name of Cape Orford.” Had these observations been made in reference to Cape Gregory, the high cliffs of which are described by Vancouver as white, they would have been intelligible; but, directed as they are by Mr. Greenhow against a headland which Vancouver expressly describes as a “wedge-like, low, perpendicular cliff; composed of black craggy rock, with breakers upon sunken rocks about four miles distant, in soundings of forty-five fathoms, black sandy bottom,” they expose Mr. Greenhow himself to the charge of not being sufficiently scrupulous when assailing a writer, towards whom he confesses that he feels considerable animosity.

Having reached Cape Lookout, in 45° 32′ N. L., Vancouver examined with attention the portion of coast which Meares had seen. About ten leagues to the north of this headland, the mountainous inland country descends suddenly to a moderate height, and were it not covered with lofty timber, might be deemed low land. Noon, “on the 27th of April, brought them in sight of a conspicuous point of land, composed of a cluster of hummocks, moderately high, and projecting into the sea from the low land above mentioned. The hummocks are barren, and steep near the sea, but their tops thinly covered with wood. On the south side of this promontory was the appearance of an inlet, or small river, the land behind not indicating it to be of any great extent; nor did it seem accessible to vessels of our burden, as the breakers extended from the above point two or three miles into the ocean, until they joined those on the beach, three or four leagues further south. On reference to Mr. Meares’ description of the coast south of this promontory, I was at first induced to believe it to be Cape Shoalwater; but on ascertaining its localities, I presumed it to be that which he calls Cape Disappointment, and the opening south of it Deception Bay. This cape was found to be in latitude of 46° 19′, longitude 236° 6′ east. The sea had now changed from its natural to river-coloured water, the probable consequence of some streams falling into the bay, or into the opening north of it, through the low land. Not considering this opening worthy of our attention, I continued our pursuit to the northwest, being desirous to embrace the advantages of the now-prevailing breeze and pleasant weather, so favourable to our examination of the coasts.”

The purport of Vancouver’s observations in the passage just cited will not be correctly appreciated, unless his instructions are kept in mind, which directed his attention exclusively to such inlets or rivers which should appear to be navigable to sea-going vessels, and be likely to facilitate in any considerable degree a communication with the northwest coast. Vancouver seems to have advanced a step beyond Heceta in observing the river-coloured water, and so determining the inlet not to be a strait of the sea; but he rightly decided that the opening in the north part of the bay was not worthy of attention, either in respect to his main object of discovering a water-communication with the northwest coast, or to the prospect of its affording a certain shelter to sea-going vessels.

Vancouver, as he approached De Fuca’s Straits on 29th April, when off Cape Flattery, fell in with the merchant ship Columbia, commanded by Mr. Robert Gray, which had sailed from Boston on the 28th Sept., 1788. Captain Gray had formerly commanded the Washington, when that vessel and the Columbia, commanded by Captain John Kendrick, visited Nootka in 1788. Having given Vancouver some information respecting De Fuca’s Straits, he stated that he had “been off the mouth of a river in the latitude of 46° 10′, where the outset, or reflux, was so strong as to prevent his entering it for nine days. This,” continues Vancouver, “was probably the opening passed by us on the forenoon of the 27th, and was apparently then inaccessible, not from the current, but from the breakers that extended across it.” Gray at this time had not succeeded in passing the bar at the mouth of the Columbia. After parting from Vancouver, he continued his course to the southward for the purposes of his summer trade. The extract from his own log-book, which Mr. Greenhow has inserted in his Appendix, will furnish the best account of his proceedings:—“May 11th, at 4 A.M. saw the entrance of our desired port bearing E.S.E., distance six leagues; in steering sails, and hauled our wind in shore. At 8 A.M., being a little to windward of the entrance into the harbour, bore away and run in E.N.E. between the breakers, having from five to seven fathoms water. When we came over the bar, we found this to be a large river of fresh water, up which we steered.”

In the British statement it is admitted that “Mr. Gray, finding himself in the bay formed by the discharge of the waters of the Columbia into the Pacific, was the first to ascertain that this bay formed the outlet of a great river—a discovery which had escaped Lieutenant Meares, when in 1788, four years before, he entered the same bay.”

This passage has been quoted to show that the claim of Captain Gray to the honour of having first crossed the bar of the river has not been impeached by the British Commissioners. He gave to the river the name of his own vessel, the Columbia.

The Columbia remained at anchor on the 12th and 13th. On the 14th of May, Gray weighed anchor, and stood up the river N.E. by E.

The log-book of the Columbia furnishes the following extract:—

“We found the channel very narrow. At 4 P.M. we had sailed upwards of twelve or fifteen miles, when the channel was so very narrow that it was almost impossible to keep in it, having from three to eighteen fathoms water, sandy bottom. At half-past four the ship took ground, but she did not stay long before she came off; without any assistance. We backed her off stern-foremost into three fathoms, and let go the small bower, and moved ship with kedge and hawser. The jolly-boat was sent to sound the channel out, but found it not navigable any further up; so of course we must have taken the wrong channel. So ends, with rainy weather; many natives alongside.” On the following day Gray unmoored, and dropped down the river with the tide. On the 18th he made the latitude of the entrance to be 46° 17′ north. On the 20th he succeeded, after some difficulty, in beating over the bar out to sea.

This log-book, the authenticity of which is vouched for by Mr. Bulfinch, of Boston, one of the owners of the Columbia, affords the best evidence that Captain Gray’s claim is limited to the discovery of the mouth of the Columbia, a discovery different indeed in degree from Heceta’s or Vancouver’s, and entitled to higher consideration, but not different in kind. It must be remembered that the problem to be solved was the discovery of the Great River of the West, but this problem was surely not solved by Gray, who expressly states that the channel which he explored was not navigable any further up than twelve or fifteen miles from the entrance; “so of course,” he adds, “we must have taken the wrong channel.” But such a description would hardly have convinced the world that Gray had succeeded in discovering the Great River, unless Lieutenant Broughton had subsequently succeeded in entering the right channel, and had explored its course for the distance of more than one hundred miles from the sea. But the reputation of this enterprising man needs no fictitious laurels. He was decidedly the first to solve the difficult question of their being a passage, such as it is, over the bar of the river.

Mr. Greenhow, in commenting upon Gray’s discovery, observes, “Had Gray, after parting with the English ships, not returned to the river, and ascended it as he did, there is every reason to believe that it would have long remained unknown; for the assertion of Vancouver, that no opening, harbour, or place of refuge for vessels was to be found between Cape Mendocino and the Strait of Fuca, and that this part of the coast formed one compact, solid, and nearly straight barrier against the sea, would have served completely to overthrow the evidence of the American fur-trader, and to prevent any further attempts to examine those shores, or even to approach them.”

Now the evidence of the American fur-trader, had he not returned to the river, would have needed no Vancouver to overthrow it, for it would have amounted to this, that Gray had been off the mouth of a river for nine days, without being able to enter it; whereas Vancouver’s own statement would have been, that on the south side of Cape Disappointment there was the appearance of an inlet or small river, “which did not however seem accessible for vessels of our burthen,” as breakers extended right across it. Mr. Greenhow misrepresents Vancouver, when he states that Meares’ opinion was subscribed without qualification by Vancouver, for Vancouver carefully limits his opinion of the river to its being inaccessible to vessels of equal burthen with his own sloop of war, the Discovery.

Gray, after entering the Columbia, appears to have returned to Nootka, and to have given to Señor Quadra, the Spanish commandant, a sketch of the river. Vancouver, having attempted in vain to conclude a satisfactory arrangement with Quadra in respect to the fulfilment of the first article of the Nootka Convention, determined to re-examine the coast of New Albion. With this object he sailed southward in the Discovery, accompanied by the Chatham and the Dædalus. The Dædalus having been left to explore Gray’s harbour in 46° 53′, the Discovery and Chatham proceeded round Cape Disappointment, and the Chatham, under Lieutenant Broughton, was directed to lead into the Columbia river, and to signalize her consort if only four fathoms water should be found over the bar. The Discovery followed the Chatham, till Vancouver found the water to shoal to three fathoms, with breakers all around, which induced him to haul off to the westward, and anchor outside the bar in ten fathoms. The Chatham, in the meantime, cast anchor in the midst of the breakers, where she rode in four fathoms, with the surf breaking over her. “My former opinion,” writes Vancouver, “of this port being inaccessible to vessels of our burthen was now fully confirmed, with this exception, that in very fine weather, with moderate winds and a smooth sea, vessels not exceeding 400 tons might, so far as we were able to judge, gain admittance.” It may be observed that the vessels of the Hudson’s Bay Company, by which the commerce of this part of the country is almost exclusively carried on, do not exceed 360 tons, and draw only fourteen feet water. Captain Wilkes, in the United States Exploring Expedition, vol. iv., p. 489, speaks of a vessel of from 500 to 600 tons, the Lausanne, having navigated the Columbia; on the other hand, the Starling, which accompanied the Sulphur exploring vessel, under Captain Belcher, in July, 1839, left her rudder on the bar, and the American corvette, the Peacock, which attempted to enter the river in July, 1841, was lost in very fine weather, having been drifted amongst the breakers by the set of the current.

When it is known that the vessels of the Hudson’s Bay Company have been obliged to lie-to off the mouth of the Columbia for upwards of two months before they could venture to cross the bar, and that vessels have been detained inside the bar for upwards of six weeks, it must be acknowledged that Vancouver’s declaration of the probable character of the river has not fallen very wide of the mark.

On the next day the Chatham succeeded, with the flood-tide, in leading through the channel, and anchored in a tolerably snug cove inside Cape Disappointment; but the Discovery, not having made so much way, was driven out by a strong ebb tide into 13 fathoms water, where she anchored for the night, and on the following day was forced by a gale of wind to stand out to sea, and to abandon all hope of regaining the river.

On the Chatham rounding the inner point of Cape Disappointment, they were surprised to hear a gun fired from a vessel, which hoisted English colours, and proved to be the Jenny, a small schooner of Bristol, commanded by Mr. James Baker, which had sailed from Nootka Sound direct to England, before Vancouver started. This cove or bay inside Cape Disappointment was in consequence named, by Lieut. Broughton, Baker’s Bay, which name it retains, and it appeared from Captain Baker’s account that this was not the first occasion of his entering the river, but that he had been there in the earlier part of the year.

The Chatham in the meantime proceeded up the inlet, and having in her course grounded for a short time on a shoal, anchored ultimately a little below the bay which had terminated Gray’s researches, to which Gray had given his own name in his chart. The sketch of this, with which Vancouver had been favoured by the Spanish commandant at Nootka, was found by Broughton not to resemble much what it purported to represent, nor did it mark the shoal on which the Chatham grounded, though it was an extensive one, lying in mid-channel. The bay, for instance, which Lieut. Broughton found to be not more than fifteen miles from Cape Disappointment, was, according to the sketch, thirty-six miles distant. Broughton left the Chatham here, and determined to pursue the further examination of the channel in the cutter and the launch.

At the distance of about twenty-five miles from the sea, Broughton found the stream narrow rather suddenly to about half a mile in breadth, which seemed to warrant him in considering the lower part, (the width of which was from three to seven miles,) to be a sound or inlet, and the true entrance of the river itself to commence from the point where it contracted itself. Broughton continued his ascent for seven days, making but slow progress against a strong stream. At the end of that time he was obliged to return from want of provisions, having reached a point which he concluded to be about 100 miles distant from the Chatham’s anchorage, and nearly 120 from the sea. He was the more readily reconciled to the abandonment of any further examination, “because even thus far the river could hardly be considered as navigable for shipping.” Previously, however, to his departure, he formally “took possession of the river and the country in its vicinity in his Britannic Majesty’s name, having every reason to believe that the subjects of no other civilised nation or state had ever entered this river before.” Broughton had fallen in with large parties of Indians in his ascent of the river, and had been kindly received by them. Amongst these was a friendly old chief, who accompanied them almost throughout the voyage, and who assisted at the ceremony and drank his Majesty’s health on the occasion. It may be reasonably suspected that this worthy old chief would have as readily joined the next comers in drinking the health of the King of Spain, or the President of the United States. From him Broughton endeavoured to obtain further information respecting the upper country. “The little that could be understood was, that higher up the river, they would be prevented from passing by falls. This was explained by taking water up in his hands, and imitating the manner of its falling from rocks, pointing at the same time to the place where the river rises, indicating that its source in that direction would be found at a great distance.”

The furthest angle of the river which Broughton reached was called by him Point Vancouver, and upon it stands in the present day Fort Vancouver, the chief establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company. A little above this are the Cascades, a series of falls and rapids extending more than half a mile, which form the limit of the tide-way; about thirty miles higher up are the Dalles, where the river rushes rapidly between vast masses of rocks, and about four miles further are the Chutes or Falls of the Columbia, where the river first enters the gap in the Cascade mountains, through which it finds its way to the ocean. Lieutenant Broughton, having occupied twelve days in the examination of the channel, prepared to join the Discovery without delay; but for four days the surf broke across the passage of the bar with such violence, as to leave no apparent opening. At last he succeeded in beating out, the Jenny schooner leading, as her commander Mr. Baker was better acquainted with the course of the channel, and after nearly losing their launch and the boat-keeper in the surf, they once more reached the open sea. Such is the summary of the account, which may be perused in full in the second volume of Vancouver’s Voyage.

Mr. Greenhow (p. 248) considers that the distinction which Broughton and Vancouver made “between the upper and lower portion of the Columbia, is entirely destitute of foundation, and at variance with the principles of our whole geographical nomenclature. Inlets and sounds,” he continues, “are arms of the sea running up into the land, and their waters, being supplied from the sea, are necessarily salt; the waters of the Columbia are on the contrary generally fresh and palatable within ten miles of the Pacific, the violence and overbearing force of the current being sufficient to prevent the further ingress of the ocean. The question appears at first to be of no consequence: the following extract from Vancouver’s Journal will, however, serve to show that the quibble was devised by the British navigators, with the unworthy object of depriving Gray of the merits of his discovery:—‘Previously to his (Broughton’s) departure, he formally took possession of the river, and the country in its vicinity, in his Britannic Majesty’s name, having every reason to believe that the subjects of no other civilised nation or state had ever entered this river before. In this opinion he was confirmed by Mr. Gray’s sketch, in which it does not appear that Mr. Gray either saw or ever was within five leagues of its entrance.’ This unjust view has been adopted by the British Government and writers, and also, doubtless from inadvertency, by some distinguished authors in the United States. It may, indeed, be considered fortunate for Gray, that by communicating the particulars of his discoveries, as he did, to Quadra, he secured an unimpeachable witness of his claims: had he not done so, the world would probably never have learned that a citizen of the United States was the first to enter the greatest river flowing from America into the Pacific, and to find the only safe harbour on the long line of coast between Port San Francisco and the Strait of Fuca.”

Mr. Greenhow may be perfectly justified in disputing the propriety of Lt. Broughton’s distinction. The words of the latter are,—“Between the ocean and that which should properly be considered the entrance of the river, is a space from three to seven miles wide, intricate to navigate on account of the shoals that extend nearly from side to side, and it ought rather to be considered as a sound than as constituting a part of the river, since the entrance into the river, which they reached about dark, was found not to be more than half a mile wide, formed by the contracting shores of the sound.” It may fairly be admitted that the ordinary use of the terms “sound,” or “inlet,” warrants the verbal criticism of Mr. Greenhow, and that they are more usually employed to distinguish arms of the sea where there is no fresh water, or tideways outside the bars of rivers. Lieutenant Broughton, if we may judge from the context would have been more correct had he used the term “estuary” instead of “sound,” for, “in common understanding,” as Lord Stowell has observed, “the embouchure or mouth of a river is that spot where the river enters the open space to which the sea flows, and where the points of the coast project no further.” (Twee Gebroeden, 3 Robinson’s Reports, p. 34.) At the same time, after a careful perusal of Vancouver’s journal, a protest must be entered against any reader of that work, particularly against one who occupies the position which Mr. Greenhow fills, attributing such motives to the British navigator, or insinuating such a probability as that Gray’s discovery would have been suppressed by Vancouver, had not Gray fortunately secured Quadra as an unimpeachable witness to it. Mr. Greenhow’s jealousy for the fame of his countryman may be excusable up to a certain point, but when he states that Vancouver “did not hesitate to adopt unworthy means to deprive the Americans of the reputation which they had justly earned by their labours in exploring, and to blacken their characters as individuals,” he has allowed an unreasonable sensitiveness to hurry him into the commission of the very fault which he censures in others, and has laid himself open to the identical charge, mutatis mutandis, which he has set up against Vancouver.

Had there been any substantial misrepresentation on the part of Vancouver in respect to what Gray actually did discover, “a want of good faith” might have been reasonably imputed to him. Happily, however, for Vancouver’s memory, the extract from the log-book of the Columbia bears out all the facts which Lieutenant Broughton alleges as to the extent of Gray’s researches. “From this point,” the latter says, alluding to a remarkable projecting point on the southern side, appearing like an island, a little above Point George, to which the name of Tongue Point was given, “was seen the centre of a deep bay, lying at the distance of seven miles N. 26 E. This bay terminated the researches of Mr. Gray; and to commemorate his discovery, it was called after him, Gray’s Bay.” “In Mr. Gray’s sketch,” Broughton further informs us, “an anchor was placed in this bay,” so that he does not attempt in any way to misrepresent the locality of the spot where Gray’s researches terminated. Lieutenant Broughton certainly denies the correctness of the sketch in respect to the distance of this bay from the entrance of the river. “It was not more,” he writes, “than fifteen miles from Cape Disappointment, though according to the sketch it measures thirty-six miles.” But the log-book itself confirms approximatively Lieutenant Broughton’s statement, for it makes the distance of the spot where Gray brought up his vessel to be about twenty-two or twenty-five miles from the entrance between the bars, and Cape Disappointment is six miles distant from the entrance, so that there must have been an error in the sketch, if we admit the accuracy of the log-book.

The result of this inquiry seems fully to warrant the position which the British commissioners insisted on in 1826-7, that the discovery of the Columbia river was a progressive discovery. Heceta made the first step in 1775, when he discovered the bay, and concluded that “the place was the mouth of some great river, or of some passage to another sea;” but Heceta’s report was not made public by the Spanish authorities. Meares, in 1788, confirmed Heceta’s discovery of the bay, but impugned the correctness of the Spanish charts, as to there being a river there with a good port; his Voyages were published in London in 1790. Vancouver, having seen Meares’ account before he left England, examined the bay in April 1792, and at that time came to the conclusion that, though there was river-coloured water in the bay, yet the opening was not worthy of attention, as being inaccessible to vessels of the same burden as the Discovery: his account was published in 1798. Gray, in the May following, after having on a former occasion beat about in the bay for nine days ineffectually, succeeded on his second visit in passing the bar, and explored the estuary for more than twenty miles: the extract of his log-book, which relates the particulars, was not made public before 1816. Lieutenant Broughton in the same year may be considered to have completed the discovery of the river, by ascending it for more than eighty miles above the limits of Gray’s researches, almost to the foot of the Cascades, where the tide ceases to be felt: the particulars of this expedition were published in the 2nd vol. of Vancouver’s Voyage, in 1798.

The plenipotentiary of the United States, Mr. Gallatin, on the other hand, repudiated the notion of Gray’s enterprise being considered as only a step in the progress of discovery, and maintained that the discovery of the river belonged exclusively to the United States; that Quadra (or he should have said, Heceta) had overlooked it; that Meares had likewise failed, and Vancouver had been not more fortunate; and that Broughton’s merit consisted merely in performing with fidelity the mechanical duty of taking the soundings 100 miles up its course. Upon the fact of this asserted first discovery in 1792, followed by the settlement of Astoria in 1812, Mr. Rush, announced, for the first time, in 1824, “that the United States claimed in their own right, and in their absolute and exclusive sovereignty and dominion, the whole of the country west of the Rocky Mountains from the 42d to at least as far up as the 51st degree of north latitude.” “It had been ascertained that the Columbia extended by the River Multnomah to as low as 42 degrees north, and by Clarke’s river to a point as high up as 51 degrees, if not beyond that point; and to this entire range of country, contiguous to the original dominions, and made a part of it by the almost intermingling waters of each, the United States,” he said, “considered their title as established, by all the principles that had ever been applied on this subject by the powers of Europe to settlements in the American hemisphere. I asserted,” he continued, “that a nation discovering a country, by entering the mouth of its principal river at the sea coast, must necessarily be allowed to claim and hold as great an extent of the interior country as was described by the course of such principal river, and its tributary streams.”

Great Britain formally entered her dissent to such a claim, denying that such a principle or usage had been ever recognised amongst the nations of Europe, or that the expedition of Captain Gray, being one of a purely mercantile character, was entitled to carry with it such important national consequences, (British and Foreign State Papers, 1825-6.)

In the subsequent discussions of 1826-7, Great Britain considered it equally due to herself and to other powers to renew her protest against the doctrine of the United States, whilst on the other hand the United States continued to maintain, that Gray’s discovery of the Columbia river gave, by the acknowledged law and usage of nations, a right to the whole country drained by that river and its tributary streams.

Haying now passed in review the main facts connected with the discovery and occupation of the Oregon territory, we may proceed to consider the general principles of international law which regulate territorial title.

CHAPTER VII.

ON THE ACQUISITION OF TERRITORY BY OCCUPATION.

Connexion of the Sovereignty of a Nation with the Domain.—Vattel. The Sovereignty and Eminent Domain (Dominium eminens) attend on Settlement by a Nation.—Settlement by an Individual limited to the Acquisition of the Useful Domain (Dominium utile.) A Nation may occupy a Country by its Agents, as by settling a Colony. Kluber’s Droits des Gens.—The Occupation must be the Act of the State.—Occupation constitutes a perfect Title.—Bracton de Legibus.—Wolff’s Jus Gentium.—Acts accessorial to Occupation, such as Discovery, Settlement, &c., create only an imperfect Title.

“When a nation takes possession of a country to which no prior owner can lay claim, it is considered as acquiring the empire or sovereignty over it, at the same time with the domain. For, since the nation is free and independent, it can have no intention, in settling in a country, to leave to others the rights of command, or any of those rights that constitute sovereignty. The whole space over which a nation extends its government, becomes the seat of its jurisdiction, and is called its territory.” (Vattel, b. i., § 205.)

The acquisition of sovereignty, therefore, attends as a necessary consequence upon the establishment of a nation in a country. But a nation may establish itself in a country, either by immigration in a body, or by sending forth a colony; and when a nation takes possession of a vacant country, and settles a colony there, “that country, though separated from the principal establishment or mother country, naturally becomes a part of the state, equally with its ancient possessions.” (Vattel, b. i., § 210.)

The right of domain in a nation corresponds to the right of property in an individual. But every nation that governs itself by its own authority and laws, without dependence on any foreign power, is a sovereign state; and when it acts as a nation, it acts in a sovereign capacity. When a nation therefore occupies a vacant country, it imports its sovereignty with it, and its sovereignty entitles it not merely to a disposing power over all the property within it, which is termed its Eminent Domain, but likewise to an exclusive right of command in all places of the country which it has taken possession of. In this respect, then, a nation differs from an individual, that, although an independent individual may settle in a country which he finds without an owner, and there possess an independent domain (the dominium utile, as distinguished from the dominium eminens,) yet he cannot arrogate to himself an exclusive right to the country, or to the empire over it. His occupation of it would be, as against other nations, rash and ridiculous (Vattel, b. ii., § 96;) and it would be termed, in the language of the Jus Gentium, a “temeraria occupatio, quæ nullum juris effectum parere potest,” (Wolffii Jus Gentium, § 308.)

A nation, however, may delegate its sovereign authority to one or more of its members for the occupation of a vacant country, equally as for other purposes, where it cannot act in a body; in such cases the practice of nations allows it to be represented by an agent. Thus the right of settling a colony is a right of occupation by an agent. The colonists represent the nation which has sent them forth, and occupy their new country in the name of the mother country. But the colonists must be sent forth by the public authority of the nation, otherwise they will possess no national character, but will be considered to be a body of emigrants, who have abandoned their country.

Thus, Kluber, in his “Droit des Gens Modernes de l’Europe:”—“Un état peut acquérir des choses qui n’appartiennent à personne (res nullius) par l’occupation (originaire;) les biens d’autrui au moyen de conventions (occupation dérivative.).... Pour que l’occupation soit légitime, la chose dolt être susceptible d’une propriété exclusive; elle ne doit appartenir à personne; l’état doit avoir l’intention d’en acquérir la propriété, et en prendre possession (the State ought to have an intention to acquire the right of property in it, and to take possession of it;) c’est à dire, la mettre entièrement à sa disposition et dans son pouvoir physique.”

Occupation, then, in this sense of the word, denotes the taking possession of a territory previously vacant, which has either always been unoccupied, or, if ever occupied, has been since abandoned. It constitutes a perfect title, and its foundation may be referred to an axiom of natural law: “Quod enim ante nullius est, id ratione naturali occupanti conceditur.” (Dig. l. 3, D. de Acq. Rer. Dom.) This principle, engrafted into the Roman law, was as fully recognised by Bracton and by Fleta:—“Jure autem gentium sive naturali dominia rerum acquiruntur multis modis. Imprimis, per occupationem eorum, quæ non sunt in bonis alicujus, et quæ nunc sunt ipsius regis de jure civili, et non communia ut olim.” (Bracton de Leg., l. ii., c. 1.)

Amongst professed writers upon international law, Wolff, who is justly considered as the founder of the science, and who, in his voluminous writings, furnished the stores out of which Vattel compiled his “Law of Nations,” has set forth so clearly this principle, as that upon which title by occupation is based, that his words may be quoted from Luzac’s French translation of his “Institutions du Droit de la Nature et des Gens:”—

“On appelle occupation, un fait par lequel quelqu’un déclare qu’une chose qui n’est à personne doit être à lui, et la réduit en tel état qu’elle peut être sa chose. Il paraît de là, que le droit d’occuper une chose, ou de s’en emparer, appartient naturellement à chacun indifféremment, ou bien que c’est un droit commun de tous les hommes, et comme on appelle manière primitive d’acquérir, celle par laquelle on acquiert le domaine d’une chose qui n’est à personne, il s’ensuit que l’occupation est la manière primitive d’acquérir.” (Part ii., ch. ii., § ccx.)

As, however, the term occupation has come to signify in common parlance rather a temporary holding than a permanent possession,—e. g., the occupation of Ancona by the French, the occupation of Lisbon by the English, the occupation of the Four Legations by the Austrians, there is an inconvenience in its ambiguity, and from this circumstance it has resulted, that occupancy is frequently employed to designate what is, properly speaking, occupation. This however is to be regretted, as the word occupancy is required in its own sense to mark the right to take possession, as distinct from the right to keep possession,—the jus possidendi from the jus possessionis,—the jus ad rem, as civilians would say, from the jus in re. Thus the right of a nation to colonise a given territory to the exclusion of other nations is a right of occupancy; the right of the colonists to exclude foreigners from their settlements would be a right of occupation.

Mr. Wheaton, in his Elements of International Law, (l. i., chap. iv., p. 205,) says, “The exclusive right of every independent state to its territory and other property is founded upon the title originally acquired by occupancy, and subsequently confirmed by the presumption arising from the lapse of time, or by treaties and other compacts of foreign states.”

It may be gathered from these writers, that to constitute a valid territorial title by occupation, the territory must be previously vacant (res nullius,) and the state must intend to take and maintain possession: and that the vacancy of the territory may be presumed from the absence of inhabitants, and will be placed beyond question by the acquiescence of other nations. If those conditions are fulfilled, the proprietary title which results is a perfect title against all other nations.

There are however several acts, that are accessorial to occupation, which do not separately constitute a perfect title. Such acts are Discovery, Settlement, Demarcation. Thus, discovery, may not be accompanied with any intention to occupy, or may not be followed up by any act of occupation within a reasonable time; settlement may be effected in territory not vacant; boundaries may be marked out which encroach upon the territory of others; so that acts of this kind will, separately, only found an imperfect or conditional title: their combination, however, under given circumstances, may establish an absolute and perfect title.

CHAPTER VIII.

ON TITLE BY DISCOVERY.

Discovery not recognised by the Roman law.—Wolff.—The Discovery must be notified.—Illustration of the Principle in reference to Nootka Sound.—Vattel.—Discovery must be by virtue of a Commission from the Sovereign.—Must not be a transient Act.—Martens’ Précis du Droit des Gens.—Kluber.—Bynkershoek.—Mr Wheaton.—Practice of Nations.—Queen Elizabeth.—Negotiations between Great Britain and the United States, in 1824.—Nootka Sound Controversy.—Discussions between the United States and Russia, in 1822.—Declaration of British Commissioners, in 1826.—Mr. Gallatin’s View.—Conditions attached to Discovery.—No second Discovery.—Wolff.—Lord Stowell.—Progressive Discovery.—Dormant Discoveries inoperative for Title.

Among the acts which are accessorial to occupation, the chief is Discovery. The title, however, which results from discovery, is only an imperfect title. It is not recognised in the Roman law, nor has it a place in the systems of Grotius or Puffendorff. The principle, however, upon which it is based is noticed by Wolff:—

“Pareillement, si quelqu’un renferme un fonds de terre dans des limites, ou la destine à quelque usage par un acte non passager, ou qui, se tenant sur ce fonds limité, il dise en présence d’autres hommes, qu’il veut que ce fonds soit à lui, il s’empare.” (Institutes du Droit des Gens, § 213.)

To this passage M. Luzac has appended the following note, pointing out the application of the principle to international relations:—

“Nous ne trouvons pas cette occupation dans le droit Romain. C’est sur elle que sont fondés les droits que les puissances s’attribuent, en vertu des découvertes.”

It will be seen from the text of M. Wolff, that the intention to take possession at the time of discovery must be declared. The comity of nations, then, presumes that the execution will follow the intention. But the reason of the thing requires that the discovery should be notified at the time when it takes place, otherwise, where actual possession has not ensued, the presumption will be altogether against a discovery, or if there had been a discovery, that it was a mere passing act, that the territory was never taken possession of, or if so, was abandoned immediately. Unless then the intention to appropriate can be presumed from the announcement of the discovery, which the comity of nations will respect,—if the first comer has not taken actual possession, but has passed on, the presumption will be that he never intended to appropriate the territory. Thus a discovery, when it has been concealed from other nations, has never been recognised as a good title: it is an inoperative act.

A case in point may be cited to illustrate the application of this principle. Mr. Greenhow (p. 116) observes, in reference to the voyage of Perez in 1775,—“The Government of Spain perhaps acted wisely in concealing the accounts of this expedition, which reflected little honour on the courage or the science of the navigators: but it has thereby deprived itself of the means of establishing beyond question the claim of Perez to the discovery of the important harbour called Nootka Sound, which is now, by general consent, assigned to Captain Cook.”

Vattel (b. i., l. xviii., § 207) discusses this title at large:—

“All mankind have an equal right to things that have not yet fallen into the possession of any one, and those things belong to the person who first takes possession of them. When therefore a nation finds a country uninhabited, and without an owner, it may lawfully take possession of it, and after it has sufficiently made known its will in this respect, it cannot be deprived of it by another nation. Thus navigators going on voyages of discovery, furnished with a commission from their sovereign, and meeting with islands or other lands in a desert state, have taken possession of them in the name of the nation; and this title has been usually respected, provided it was soon after followed by a real possession.”

According to this statement, the act of discovery must be sanctioned by a commission from the sovereign, and the will of the nation to take possession must be by its agent sufficiently made known. What acts should be respected by the courtesy of nations, and be held sufficient to make known formally the will of a nation to avail itself of a discovery, has been a subject of much dispute. The tendency, however, both of writers and statesmen, has been to limit rather than to extend the title by discovery, ever since the Papal Bulls of the 16th century enlarged it to an inconvenient extent, to the exclusive benefit of two favoured nations.

Thus Vattel:—“The law of nations will, therefore, not acknowledge the property and sovereignty of a nation over any uninhabited countries except those of which it has really taken actual possession, in which it has formed settlements, or of which it makes actual use. In effect, when navigators have met with desert countries in which those of other nations had, in their transient visits, erected some monuments to show their having taken possession of them, they have paid as little regard to that empty ceremony as to the regulation of the Popes, who divided a great part of the world between the crowns of Castile and Portugal.”

To the same purport, Martens, in his Précis du Droit des Gens, § 37:—

“Supposé que l’occupation soit possible, it faut encore qu’elle ait eu lieu effectivement,—que le fait de la prise de possession ait concouru avec la volonté manifeste de s’en approprier l’objet. La simple déclaration de volonté d’une nation ne suffit pas non plus qu’une donation papale, ou une convention entre deux nations pour imposer à d’autres le devoir de s’abstenir de l’usage ou de l’occupation de l’objet en question. Le simple fait d’avoir été le premier à découvrir ou à visiter une île, &c., abandonnée ensuite, semble insuffisant, même de l’aveu des nations, tant qu’on n’a point laissé de traces permanentes de possession et de volonté, et ce n’est pas sans raison qu’on a souvent disputé entre les nations, comme entre les philosophes, si des croix, des poteaux, des inscriptions, &c., suffisent pour acquérir ou pour conserver la propriété exclusive d’un pays qu’on ne cultive pas.”

Kluber, to the same effect, writes thus: (§ 126)—“Pour acquérir une chose par le moyen de l’occupation, il ne suffit point d’en avoir seulement l’intention, ou de s’attribuer une possession purement mentale; la déclaration même de vouloir occuper, faite antérieurement à l’occupation effectuée par un autre, ne suffirait pas. Il faut qu’on ait réellement occupé le premier, et c’est par cela seul qu’en acquérant un droit exclusif sur la chose, on impose à tout tiers l’obligation de s’en abstenir. L’occupation d’une partie inhabitée et sans maître du globe de la terre, ne peut donc s’étendre plus loin qu’on ne peut tenir pour constant qu’il y ait eu effectivement prise de possession, dans l’intention de s’attribuer la propriété. Comme preuves d’une pareille prise de possession, ainsi que de la continuation de la possession en propriété, peuvent servir tous les signes extérieurs qui marquent l’occupation et la possession continue.”

On this passage there is the following note:—“Le droit de propriété d’état peut, d’après le droit des gens, continuer d’exister, sans que l’état continue la possession corporelle. Il suffit qu’il existe un signe qui dit, que la chose n’est ni res nullius, ni délaissée. En pareil cas personne ne saurait s’approprier la chose, sans ravir de fait, à celui qui l’a possédée jusqu’alors en propriété, ce qu’il y a opéré de son influence d’une manière légitime: enlever ceci ce serait blesser le droit du propriétaire.”

It would be difficult to determine theoretically what would constitute a sufficient sign that the territory is not vacant, or abandoned. Bynkershoek, who was opposed to the continuance of proprietary right from discovery, unless corporeal possession was maintained, subsequently qualified his view. “Præter animum possessionem desidero, sed qualemcunque, quæ probet, me nec corpore desiisse possidere.” (De Dominio Maris, ch. i., De Origine Dominii.)

Mr. Wheaton, in his work on International Law, (vol. i., ch. iv., § 5,) writes thus:—“The claim of European nations to the possessions held by them in the New World discovered by Columbus and other adventurers, and to the territories which they have acquired on the continents and islands of Africa and Asia, was originally derived from discovery or conquest and colonisation, and has since been confirmed in the same manner by positive compact.”

The practice of nations seems fully to bear out the theory of jurists, as it may be gathered from the language of sovereigns and statesmen. Thus, in reference to the northwest coast of America, on occasion of the earliest dispute between the crowns of Spain and England, Queen Elizabeth refused to admit the exclusive pretensions of the Spaniards. When Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, remonstrated against the expedition of Drake, she replied, “that she did not understand why either her subjects, or those of any other European prince, should be debarred from traffic in the Indies: that, as she did not acknowledge the Spaniards to have any title by donation of the Bishop of Rome, so she knew no right they had to any places other than those they were in actual possession of; for that their having touched only here and there upon a coast, and given names to a few rivers or capes, were such insignificant things as could in no ways entitle them to a propriety further than in the parts where they actually settled, and continued to inhabit.” (Camden’s Annals, anno 1580.)

Such was the language of the Crown of England in the sixteenth century, and in no respect is the language of Great Britain altered in the present day. Thus, in reference to the negotiations between Great Britain and the United States, in 1824, Mr. Rush, in a letter to Mr. Adams, of August 12, 1824, writes thus:—“As to the alleged prior discoveries of Spain all along that coast, Britain did not admit them, but with great qualification. She could never admit that the mere fact of Spanish navigators having first seen the coast at particular points, even where this was capable of being substantiated as the fact, without any subsequent or efficient acts of sovereignty or settlement following on the part of Spain, was sufficient to exclude all other nations from that portion of the globe.” (State Papers, 1825-26, p. 512.)

But the Spanish crown itself, on the occasion of the Nootka Sound controversy, felt that a claim to exclusive territorial title could not be reasonably maintained on the plea of mere discovery. Thus, in the Declaration of his Catholic Majesty, on June 4, 1790, which was transmitted to all the European Courts, and consequently bound the Crown of Spain in the face of all nations, the following precise language was employed:—

“Nevertheless, the King does deny what the enemies to peace have industriously circulated, that Spain extends pretensions and rights of sovereignty over the whole of the South Sea, as far as China. When the words are made use of, ‘In the name of the King, his sovereignty, navigation, and exclusive commerce to the continent and islands of the South Sea,’ it is the manner in which Spain, in speaking of the Indies, has always used these words,—that is to say, to the continent, islands, and seas which belong to his Majesty, so far as discoveries have been made and secured to him by treaties and immemorial possession, and uniformly acquiesced in, notwithstanding some infringements by individuals, who have been punished upon knowledge of their offences. And the King sets up no pretensions to any possessions, the right to which he cannot prove by irrefragable titles.”

The pretensions of Spain to absolute sovereignty, commerce, and navigation, had already been rejected by the British Government, and they had insisted that English subjects, trading under the British flag, “have an indisputable right to the enjoyment of a free and uninterrupted navigation, commerce, and fishery; and to the possession of such establishments as they should form, with the consent of the natives of the country, not previously occupied by any of the European nations.”

Again, the Crown of Spain, in demanding assistance from France, according to the engagements of the Family Compact, rested her supposed title upon “treaties, demarcations, takings of possession, and the most decided acts of sovereignty exercised by the Spaniards from the reign of Charles II., and authorised by that monarch in 1692.”

It will thus be seen that Spain, in setting up a title by discovery, supported her claims by alleging that the act was authorised by the Crown, was attended with “takings of possession,” and was confirmed by treaties, e. g., that of Utrecht.