1762.] FAMILY COMPACT. 103 



of Great Britain. The interests of France in the New World were 

 so small, after these arrangements, that they could scarcely of them- 

 selves afford grounds for dispute between her and Spain ; and the 

 two crowns were, moreover, supposed to be firmly united by a 

 treaty celebrated in history as the Family Compact, concluded in 

 1762, through the agency, chiefly, of the duke de Choiseul, prime 

 minister of France, by which the sovereigns of those kingdoms 

 guarantied to each other all their dominions in every part of the 

 world, and engaged to consider as their common enemy any nation 

 which should become the enemy of either. 



The claims of Spain to the sovereignty of the western side of 

 America were never made the subject of controversy with any 

 other state until 1790 ; but her pretensions to the exclusive navi- 

 gation of the Pacific, though upheld by her government even after 

 that period, had long before ceased to be regarded with respect by 

 the rest of the world. The free-traders, freebooters, and bucaniers, — 

 that is to say, the smugglers and pirates,-^ of Great Britain, France, 

 and Holland, led the way into that ocean, which they continued 

 to infest during the whole of the seventeenth and a part of the 

 eighteenth centuries : they were followed by the armed squadrons 

 of those nations, with one or other of which Spain was almost 

 always at war ; and during the intervals of peace came the exploring 

 ships of the same powers, whose voyages, though at first ostensibly 

 scientific, were, with good reason, considered at Madrid as ominous 

 of evil to the dominion of Spain in America.* 



These exploring voyages became more frequent, and their objects 

 were avowedly political as well as scientific, after the peace of 

 1763 ; about which time, moreover, they were rendered more safe, 

 expeditious, and effective in every respect, by the introduction of 

 the reflecting quadrant and the chronometer into use on board the 

 public ships of all the maritime nations of Europe, except Spain 

 and Portugal. Between that year and 1779 the Pacific and the 

 southern oceans were annually swept by well-appointed ships of 

 Great Britain or France, under able navigators, whose journals were 

 published immediately on the conclusion of their voyages, in the 



* Lord Lansdowne, in a speech in the British House of Lords, December 13, 1790, 

 on the subject of the convention then recently concluded with Spain, said — "Sir 

 Benjamin Keene, [ambassador from Great Britain at Madrid from 1754 to 1757,] one 

 of the ablest foreign ministers this country ever had, used to say, that, if the Span- 

 iards vexed us in the first instance, we had means enough to vex them in return, 

 without infringing treaties ; and the first step he would recommend would be to 

 send out ships of discovery to the South Sea." 



