JURISDICTIONAL RIGHTS IN BERING SEA, 205 



to a "strip of land" on tlie iNortliwest coast and tlie waters of tlie Pa- 

 cific Ocean adjacent thereto. For future reference 1 call special atten- 

 tion to the phrase "strip of land," 



I venture to remind Lord Salisbury- of the fact that Behring Sea was, 

 at the time referred to, the recognized name in some quarters, and so 

 appeared on many authentic maps several years before tlie treaties were 

 negotiated. But, as I mentioned in my note of June 30, the same sea 

 had been presented as a body of water separate from the Pacific Ocean 

 for a long period prior to 1825, Many names had been applied to it, 

 but the one most frequently used and most wi<lely recognized was the 

 Sea of Kamchatka, English statesmen of the period when the treaties 

 were negotiated had complete knowledge of all the geographical points 

 involved. They knew that on the map published in 17S4 to illustrate 

 the voyages of the most eminent Enghsh navigatoi- of the eighteenth 

 century tlie "Sea of Kamchatka" ap])eared in absolute contradistinc- 

 tion to the "Great South Sea" or the Pacific Ocean, And the map, as 

 shown by the wcnxls on its margin, was "prepared by Lieut, Henry 

 ]toberts under the immediate inspection of Oai)tain (^ook," 



Twenty years before Captain Cook's map appeared, the London Maga- 

 zine contained a map on which the Sea of Kamchatka was conspicu- 

 ously engraved. At a still earlier date — even as far back as 1732 — 

 Ovosdef, surveyor of the llnsf?i an expedition of Shestakof in 1730 (who, 

 even before Behring. sighted the land of the American continent), pub- 

 lished the sea as bearing the name of Kamchatka. Muller, who was 

 historian and geographer of the second expedition of Bering in 1741, 

 designated it as the Sea of Kamchatka, in his map published in 17G1. 



I inclose a list of a large proportion of the most authentic inaj^s pub- 

 lished during the ninety years prior to 1825 in Great Britain, in the 

 United States, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Germany, and liussia — 

 in all 105 maps — on every one of ivMch the body of water now known as 

 Behrin g Sea was plainly distin gui shed by a n ame separate from the Paci fie 

 Ocean. On the great majority it is named the Sea of Kamschatka, a 

 few use the name of Behring, while several other designations are used. 

 The whole number, aggregating, as they did, the opinion of a large 

 part of the civilized world, distinguished tlie sea, no matter under what 

 name, as altogether separate from the Pacific Ocean. (See inclosure 

 B.) 



Is it possible, that with this great cloud of witnesses before the eyes 

 of Mr. Adams and Mr. George Canning, attesting the existence of the 

 Sea of Kamchatka, they would simply include it in the phrase "Pacific 

 Ocean" and make no allusion whatever to it as a separate sea, when it 

 was known by almost every educated man in Europe and Annnica to 

 have been so designated numbeiless times? Is it possible that Mr. Can- 

 ning and Mr. Adams, both educated in the common law, could believe 

 that they were acquiring for the United States and Great Britain the 

 enormous rights inherent in theSeaof Kamchatka, without the slightest 

 reference to that sea or without any descrijition of its metes and bounds, 

 when neither of them would have paid for a village house lot unless 

 the deed for it should recite every fact and feature necessary for the 

 identification of the lot against any other piece of ground on the sur- 

 face of the globe. When we contemplate the minute particularity, the 

 tedious verbiage, the duplications aiul the reduplications employed to 

 secure unmistakable plainness in framing treaties, it is impossible to 

 conceive that a fact of this great magnitude could have been omitted 

 from the iustructions written by Mr. Adams and Mr. G. Canning, as 

 secretaries for foreign affairs in their resijective countries— impossible 

 34 



