AVES ISLAND. ' 281 



obtained from Mr. Marcy, and this a few days before Mr. Sanford's 

 arrival in Caraccas, be devoted bimself exclusively to tbe agitation of 

 the question, and wrote his first note asking for an indemnity, and 

 stating that he had not applied for it before, in view of the necessity 

 under which he was placed of consulting his cabinet on the point of the 

 document signed by Lang and Gribbs^ which, in his opinion, required 

 certain explanations. He spoke also of certain instructions of his gov- 

 ernment, which, sent to him since the month of August, 1856, did not 

 reach him, through the fact of loss or miscarriage, and of the purport 

 of which he did not become possessed until a copy of them was shown 

 to him by Mr. Sanford, who had brought it over. To his aforesaid 

 claim of the 20th of December, he annexed certain declarations, which 

 could not have been all that he had in his possession, since there was 

 missing the declaration of Gribbs, one of the signers of the permit, and 

 if he sent it with his second communication, when the circumstance 

 was adverted to in the first answer of the undersigned, it" was in the 

 shape of a printed and mutilated paper, the meaning of which is, up 

 to .this moment, ignored. 



When the executive power perceived this insistance on a claim, 

 which, judging from the conduct of the United States legation for two 

 years, could not be held in very high regard ; and one, too, which 

 merely rested on the testimony of some of the interested parties them- 

 selves, he deemed it his duty, on his part^ to adopt measures of inves- 

 tigation, necessary not only in his view of the matter, but in the opinion 

 also of the government council, to which the question had been referred. 

 Those investigations were not closed by the time of Mr. Eames's de- 

 joarture, nor are they all so even at the present day, whence the 

 depending facts that neither has the record of proceedings been returned 

 by the council, nor has it yet been made known whether the arguments 

 of the legation have changed the government's view of the case. 



His Excellency also desires to convince the government of your 

 country that Venezuela, in acting as she has done, was far from any 

 intent, in the least degree, of ofi'ending the Americans found in Aves 

 Island, as it stands to reason that he who uses his own right inflicts 

 no injury on another, and that he holcts full mastery over a thing to 

 exclude others from its enjoyment. And even were this not the case, 

 the Americans themselves, by recognizing, in the manner in which 

 they did recognize, the dominion of Venezuela and the unlawfulness of 

 its possession by them, would have justified the proceedings of the 

 national force. Besides, in no form or shape was violence resorted to 

 in their regard, to secure their dispossession, nor could it have been so 

 done. A verbal warning was given to them, and without threats ; 

 nothing more. The number of their vessels, of their laborers, of their 

 arms, cannons, guns, muskets, boarding pikes, cutlasses, and pistols ; 

 their large supply of powder— all this, in comparison with twenty-five 

 soldiers under Colonel Bias's command on board of the Venezuelan 

 schooner, with ten individuals constituting the whole number of the 

 garrison left on the island, even with the additional force of fifteen by 

 which said garrison was increased when another schooner of Venezuela 

 reached the port, could have enabled them, in any one of those three 

 occasions, and especially on the second, to resist and victoriously repel 



