202 AVES ISLAND. 



in the Department of State, as lias been done in other similar cases, 

 whether they had a right to the usufruct of those places. 



The Island of Aves is not derelict, nor is it conceived how Mr. 

 Eames can assert it to be so, when he lays it down in the same para- 

 graph that it has never been reduced to possession nor has been under 

 the jurisdiction of any power. If no one has ever occupied it at any 

 time, who abandoned it, leaving it voluntarily as lost? But how can 

 a thing be reputed as abandoned, concerning which two nations have 

 been for a long time in controversy ? The assertion that characterizes 

 the citizens of the United States as discoverers of the Aves is entirely 

 unfounded ; and the guano thereon being the accession of the soil, it 

 pertains to the owner of the land, not to those that discovered that 

 substance. The United States did not commission the Americans in 

 question to occupy the Island of Aves, and to take possession of it in 

 their name. Thence it is clear that they could not hoist thereupon the 

 flag of their country^ nor assume the authority to say that they acted 

 in its name, as Wheeler asserts that he informed the captain of the 

 English ship Devastation. Keduced, therefore, to the class of mere 

 private persons, they did not possess the faculty of acquiring as inhe- 

 rent in nations ; they did not possess the right to compete with any 

 nation, nor consider as occupied an island, the posseession of which 

 they would in vain struggle to maintain by defending it against the 

 States that would desire to appropriate it. 



If the island of Aves was a thing common to all, of which, there- 

 fore, all could avail themselves, it is not to be inferred from this fact 

 that any obstacle can be alleged to its occupation by Venezuela or any 

 other nation ; and this act once executed, it would from that time have 

 entered into the special dominion of the occupant, ceasing thereby to 

 be common property. Every one would then be compelled to respect 

 a right that each one might have appropriated, and of which no one 

 before sought to avail himself exclusively. Will the United States 

 maintain that an object so capable of an appropriation as an island, 

 could ever be reduced to private dominion on the ground that private 

 individuals of different nations had enjoyed the use of it from time to 

 time ? Undoubtedly not. Then they have no doubt in regard to the 

 eminent domain of Venezuela in the Aves, as Mr. Eames has often 

 said to the undersigned, and they only dispute the private property of 

 the guano found on that spot. So certain is this, that the federal 

 government being perhaps ignorant in December, 1854, as probably 

 might have been the case with Mr. Eames, even if he had been at that 

 time in Caraccas, that there existed any guano at all on the Aves, and 

 still more that countrymen of his were in the enjoyment of it, not only 

 did not dispute the validity of the Wallace contract, but even made 

 efforts to renew it when annulled by the executive power, and has 

 since protected with great zeal the contractors of guano existing on the 

 Aves and other islands pertaining to Venezuela. To suppose that 

 Venezuela had the domain and the dominion over the Aves, necessary 

 to enable it to dispose freely and for its own benefit, as Mr. Eames 

 says, of the only substance that makes the island valuable, and to 

 assert at the same time that the Am^ericans preserve their right to that 

 substance, implies a contradiction difficult to understand. If they are 



