216 AYES ISLAND. 



were a wholly separate matter, and would as such be effectually and 

 fully sustained by the United States, and, finally, that the conclusion 

 of a satisfactory arrangement with the agent of the assignees of the 

 Wallace contract would, by freeing these anterior claims from formid- 

 able additional aggravation and difficulty, leave them, as a very 

 grave and serious question, to be afterwards adjusted upon due con- 

 sideration of their own separate character and merits. 



And, after full consideration of the whole matter, the government of 

 Venezuela, with this recorded position of the government of the United 

 States upon that subject in its hands, did, in full view of this record, 

 five days afterwards, conclude the arrangement with the agent of the 

 assignees of the Wallace contract. That the government of Vene- 

 zuela should take notice of this record in framing that arrangement 

 was a matter of course, and that such notice was taken may be in- 

 ferred from the fact that the new arrangement, departing from the 

 form of the Wallace contract, omitted all mention of the Aves in the 

 article granting the usufruct of the guano islands of the republic to 

 the assignees of that contract, and afterwards, in another article, 

 specified the Aves with the apparent object of relieving Venezuela 

 from liability to those assignees in the event that her possession and 

 use of it for her own profit should, in view of this claim or from any 

 other reason, terminate. Such was the view taken by the undersigned 

 when, in reference to the subject of the cession to the government of 

 Holland of the then armed possession of the Aves by Venezuela, he, * 

 in his note of the 8th of March, 1856, after formally and urgently 

 protesting against such cession upon the main and principal ground of 

 the rights and claims of these claimants to that island^ and of the in- 

 ternational reclamation by the government of the United States in 

 their behalf then pending in its full extent, considered it proper also 

 to address the government of Venezuela, in that note, the following 

 additional language, fully recognizing and restating the recorded 

 position taken by him in regard to the Aves in the whole course of the 

 negotiation in question : 



" The undersigned in this connection deems it his duty further to 

 state that he has in his possession a copy of a contract entered into on 

 the 29th of September last between the government of Venezuela and 

 John F. Pickrell, a citizen of the United States, conveying to the said 

 contractor and his associates certain exclusive privileges in the guano 

 islands of Venezuela, in which contract the undersigned perceives that 

 the island of Aves in question is specified under certain conditions and 

 stipulations therein set forth. Though it is undoubtedly true that the 

 inclusion of that island in the said contract, in any form and to any 

 extent, took place without any manner of countenance or sanction on 

 the part of the government of the United States or of the undersigned, 

 by whom, on the contrary, all the rights and claims of its prior Amer- 

 ican occupants were fully and expressly reserved from being in any 

 way affected or impaired by that negotiation ; and though the under- 

 signed, in view of that reservation, now abstains from giving any 

 manner of sanction to the insertion of the Aves Island in that contract 

 to operate thereby any defeat of those reserved rights and claims in 

 their full extent, yet he deems it his duty to state in reference to the 



