1826.] CLAIMS OF GREAT BRITAIN. 349 



valid, except that acquired from Spain, through the Florida treaty, 

 in 1819 ; and the right thus acquired they pronounced to be nothing 

 more than the right secured to Spain, in common with Great Brit- 

 ain, by the Nootka convention, in 1790, to trade and settle in any 

 part of those countries, and to navigate their waters. Dismissing 

 the claims of Spain, on the grounds of discovery, prior to 1790, 

 as futile and visionary, and inferior to those of Great Britain on the 

 same grounds, they maintained that all arguments and pretensions 

 of either of those powers, whether resting on discovery or on any 

 other consideration, were definitively set at rest by the Nootka 

 convention, after the signature of which, the title was no longer to 

 be traced in vague discoveries, several of them admitted to be 

 apocryphal, but in the text and stipulations of that convention 

 itself ; and that, as the Nootka convention applied to all parts of the 

 north-west coast of America not occupied, in 1790, by either of 

 the parties, it of course included any portion of Louisiana which 

 might then have extended, on the Pacific, north of the northern- 

 most Spanish settlement, and which could not, therefore, be claimed 

 by the United States, in virtue of the treaty for the cession of Lou- 

 isiana to that republic, in 1803. 



Having assumed this ground, it was scarcely necessary for the 

 British plenipotentiaries to go further into the examination of the 

 titles of the United States ; and they probably acted on this suppo- 

 sition, as it is otherwise impossible to account for the gross mis- 

 statements with regard to the discoveries of the Americans, the 

 extravagant and unfounded assumptions, and the illogical deduc- 

 tions, in the document presented by them to Mr. Gallatin, on the 

 part of their government. Thus, with regard to the discovery of 

 the mouth of the Columbia, they insisted that " Mr. Meares, a lieu- 

 tenant in the royal navy, who had been sent by the East India 

 Company on a trading expedition to the north-west coasts of 

 America," really effected that discovery four years before Gray is 

 even pretended to have entered the river;* though they indeed 

 admitted that " Mr. Gray, finding himself in the bay formed by the 

 discharge of the waters of the Columbia into the Pacific, ivas the 

 first to ascertain that this bay formed the outlet of a great river, a 

 discovery which had escaped Lieutenant Meares " when he entered 

 the same bay ; but that, even supposing the priority of Gray's dis- 

 covery to be proved, it was of no consequence in the case, as the 



* See p. 177. 



