[GANONG ] BOUNDARIES OF NEW BRUNSWICK 291 
In letters to the two governments transmitting the decision, 
they say : “In making this decision it became necessary that each 
of the commissioners should yield a part of his individual opinion. 
Several reasons induced them to adopt this measure ; one of which 
was the impression and belief that the navigable waters of the Bay 
of Passamaquoddy, which, by the Treaty of Ghent, is said to be part 
of the Bay of Fundy, are common to both parties for the purpose of 
all lawful and direct communication with their own territories and 
foreign ports.” (Moore, 61.) 
This decision was accepted by both governments,’ closed the 
question and established the present boundary. It left, however, 
the exact channel in the passages from Passamaquoddy Bay to the 
Bay of Fundy unmarked, a question of comparatively slight import- 
ance which, as we shall see later, has not yet been settled. 
It will be of interest now to consider the grounds on which the 
decision of the commissioners was reached, and these are fully given 
by Barclay in a letter in his correspondence, cited by Moore (55). I 
shall here summarize them in a general form. The commission of 
course accepted the contention of the British agent, the only course 
in accord with the evidence, and the same as the decision of the St. 
Croix Commission, that the Nova Scotia of Alexander’s grant of 
1621 and the Nova Scotia of the treaty of 1783 were one and the 
same. Since the treaty of 1783 granted to the United States all 
islands south of a due east line? from the mouth of the St. Croix, 

1 Although the Americans appear to have felt they should have obtained 
Grand Manan (Moore, 63). 
2 The establishment of this due east line from the mouth of the St. Croix 
indicates a remarkable carelessness on the part of the negotiators of the 
Treaty of 1783. It not only is a very illogical line geographically, since, even 
interpreted on the basis of Mitchel’s map, (Map No. 19), it immediately cuts 
across the mainland of Nova Scotia and runs far up the Bay of Fundy, giving 
the United States an apparent claim to any islands on the coast of the 
peninsula of Nova Scotia falling within twenty leagues (sixty miles) of 
the coast of the United States, to which Nova Scotia could not prove a 
right ; but it also ignores the fact, which other expressions in the Treaty 
show was well-known to the Commissioners, that the western boundary of 
Nova Scotia was a straight line from St. Marys Bay to the St. Croix, and 
that hence this due east line, intended to form a boundary of the island 
possessions of the United States, fell wholly within the limits of Nova Scotia. 
Cases in which a treaty between two nations adopts as a boundary a line 
lying wholly within the limits of the other are probably rare. The circum- 
stance is however partially explained though not excused by the fact that 
the instructions given the negotiators by Congress (printed in the Secret 
Journals in 1821, and cited in the Statement of the Case of the United States, 
of 1829), directed them to secure the St. John river from source to mouth as 
a boundary ; and the due east line was to be drawn from the mouth of that 
