Benns: British West India Carrying-Trade 25 
to escape the provision regarding re-export from the United 
States of West India goods, which had aroused so much opposi- 
tion to the Jay Treaty. In fact, the American commissioners 
were explicitly warned to steer clear of any provision which 
might be interpreted as forbidding the American shippers to 
export West India goods which had come from other than 
British islands.'^® 
In England, however, as was revealed by the colonial trade 
legislation of the preceding year, there was a prejudice against 
American navigation which had taken deep hold of the minds 
of a great proportion of the community, not only those in the 
mercantile line, but the whole commercial interest and many 
who were influential in the country."^^ Altho Lord Grenville, 
apparently, did not hold these same prejudices, he did fear 
that any regulation of the British West India trade, however 
fair it might be, would endanger any treaty which might be 
formed .^2 Consequently it was agreed simply that each coun- 
try should remain in the complete possession of its rights in 
respect to this trade, which meant that legally the British 
Government excluded American vessels only, on the other 
hand, to indemnify the governors of the various islands when 
from time to time they were compelled by necessity to open 
their ports to those same vessels. 
The next important interruption of this more or less fre- 
quently interrupted British West India trade came in the 
guise of the Embargo Act which was passed by the American 
Government in December, 1807. Many thought that the good 
results of this act would be the greater because of the effect 
which it would have in the British West Indies. The predic- 
tion was even made that before the measure was ninety days 
known in the West Indies, it would bring Great Britain to the 
feet of the United States, “that it would act as a great politi- 
cal lever, resting its fulcrum on Jamaica, and move all Europe” 
to American wishes. 
According to one American senator, when the embargo 
was first laid, the British nation was alarmed because of its 
belief in the dependence of the West India settlements on the 
United States for the means of subsistence, a belief which 
Am. State Papers, For. Rel., Ill, 124. 
^^Ibid., Ill, 143, 144. 
^^Ibid., Ill, 131. 
Benton, Abridgements of the Debates in Congress, IV, 66, 67. 
