should ever have been submitted to arbitration at all, still less in a mutilated and imperfect form. For the sake of peace and in ignorance of the real facts of the case, England had already given up the Oregon territory and all the country south of the fortyninth parallel, although it was as much British territory as Ontario or Quebec. The only claim to San Juan on the part of the States arose out of our weakness in ceding the boundary in

1846.

The question was, indeed, made to turn on whether it had not been America which had been generous in conceding to us the southern portion of Vancouver Island, and that when the only geographical right which America could have to any portion of the Straits of Fuca had accrued through our acceptance of the forty-ninth parallel as the boundary.

At the time when following the footsteps of the Russian Columbus Behring numerous adventurers established a regular trading company, chiefly in pursuit of the sea-beaver or otter (Lutra marina), on the territory of Alaska, or as the Americans have since dubbed it, Aliaska-at or about 1760-the only Europeans settled on those shores of America, which lie on the Pacific Ocean, were the Spaniards. They swayed these regions on a line of more than eight thousand miles from Cape Horn, in the south to California, and according to their own claims, which they always supported with the old papal bull of partition, further yet, "as far as these coasts extended to the north."

The discoveries of the Russians, and their steady advances towards the east and south, could not fail to excite the notice and solicitude of the Spaniards. They had, indeed, under Cortez, made some attempts to discover the north-west coast of America. But neither these attempts, nor the expeditions under the Viceroy Mendoza (the successor of Cortez), had brought them beyond California. The rainy, stormy, mountainous, barbaric northwest appeared to them not very attractive, and they were the more willing to leave it in the unexplored obscurity which covered it, from the fear that the clearing up of this darkness might assist the English in finding out the long-sought north-west passage.

But when all at once there appeared from quite another country wholly unexpected guests and rivals in the Pacific Ocean and in the North of America, the Spaniards waked out of their apathetic inactivity, and the viceroys of Mexico set themselves in motion to meet the Russians, and watch what they were about. From the year 1774, they sent out a series of expeditions towards the northwest, which sailed up the coast of America as far as the huge mountain Elias, and the islands of Kodiak, and Unalaska, in order to look after the newly arrived Russians. They touched at

many points on the coast, and seized possession of them where they did not already find them occupied by the Russians. They pushed, too, their settlements, forts, and missions, further up towards the north, and at last took possession of those admirable ports of California, Monterey and San Francisco.

The result of these expeditions was, among other discoveries, that of the mouth of the Columbia in 1775, by Quadra, as also of the southern portion of the great island of Vancouver. Quadra called the river, that of Ascension, as also the entrance of Heceta, from the name of one of his comrades. The island he named after himself. The river of Ascension was afterwards called the Columbia by the American navigator, Gray, not in memory of the great Columbus, but from the name of the sloop which he commanded, just as the island of Quadra was afterwards named after Vancouver, after the captain in the British navy, who completed its survey.

The far-famed Greek, Valerianos, known as Juan de Fuca, long a seaman in the Spanish service, but afterwards employed by the British government to search for a north-west passage, discovered the straits which still bear his name. Sailing up by the Rosario Strait for twenty days, he found the water expand again in the Gulf of Georgia, and he either fancied that this expansion, leading to Queen Charlotte Sound, or that some one of the numerous inlets that penetrate into the interior to the eastwards, actually opened into the Atlantic.

The English, it is to be observed, had set themselves in movement towards the north of the Pacific and the north-west of America, at or about the same time as the Spaniards—certainly not two years later. In the year 1776, they sent the great navigator, Cook, who had already made two celebrated voyages in the South Pacific, on a third voyage, whose direction was round Cape Horn towards North America. Cook reconnoitred just those countries, which, till then, the Spaniards and Russians had regarded as their exclusive province of discovery, and did it, too, it is admitted on all hands, in a more satisfactory and effective manner. His pioneering expedition was followed by a host of English trading enterprises. In the course of the decade 1780-90, many English captains sailed towards North-Western America, and threw themselves especially on those parts which lay central between the Russian possessions in the north, and the Spanish in the south, lands in which the sea-otter skins were yet so abundant that the barbarous inhabitants used this costly fur for their ordinary mantles, bed-coverings, and tent-hangings. These articles, secured to the English traders, were brought over to China to adorn the proud mandarins of the Great Khan.

It was thus that arose the territories long known on the maps as New Albion, extending from the Straits of Fuca to Cape Mendocina, and embracing the valley of the Columbia river. "New Hanover," east of the Gulf of Georgia as the northern prolongation of Fuca Straits were called, and "New Cornwall" and New Norfolk" east of Queen Charlotte Island, of the Princess Royal, the Prince of Wales Islands, and of King George the III's. Archipelago. For a long time, indeed, the British held undisputed sway over the coasts of North-America on the Pacific from Mount Elias to Cape Mendocina.

In 1805, however, the American captains, Lewis and Clarke, crossed the Rocky Mountains and discovered the two tributaries to the river Columbia, which come from the south and which were named after themselves. After a journey of nine weeks over tremendous mountains and precipices, they arrived at the river known to the natives as the Kookoo-skee, one of the tributary streams of the Columbia. This was on the 18th of October; and sailing down the stream in canoes made by themselves, they arrived at its mouth on the 7th of November, after a voyage of three weeks. This successful excursion into new territories was followed by the foundation of a new settlement, called Astoria, on the south side of the Columbia, for the purposes of opening commercial intercourse with China. This settlement, however, although Washington Irving lent his clever pen to exalt its beauties and enhance its prosperous future, has never thriven on account of the immense distance and insuperable difficulties of the passage across the Rocky Mountains-difficulties which have to a great extent been done away with, since the foundation by the Americans of the states of "Idaho," "Oregon," and "Washington," where were formerly "New Albion" and "New Hanover," and subsequently British Columbia. The discovery of the Lewis and Clarke's rivers by the Americans, they being branches of a river known to and occupied by the British settlers, can scarcely be said to have given a claim to the occupation of the lands watered by them to the Americans; but supposing that to be an open question, neither that discovery nor the foundation of Astoria, could give rights over the mouth of the river, except such as would be established by the act of taking possession, which some have declared to be nine points of the law, and so it has proved in many cases in the encroachments effected by the Americans. Certain it is that the occupation of the valley of the Columbia and the foundation of the settlement of Astoria, were followed by the first manifestation of weakness on the part of Great Britain in these remote lands, and the treaty of 1795 was negotiated by which the parallel of the forty-ninth deg. of north

latitude was fixed as the southern boundary of British America in its continental part. From that moment British Columbia became a misnomer, and the land that remained to the British might as well have been named British Fraseria or New Caledonia. Fraser river was, indeed, known at first as Caledonia river, Thompson's and Fraser rivers being tributaries, and the name of New Caledonia is still attached to the gold-producing regions in the Upper Fraser. The Upper Columbia, and the O'Kanagan, one of its tributaries, still, however, flow from British territory, north of the parallel of forty-nine deg.

If ever a great city arises in these territories, its position will very probably be at the junction of Lewis river and the Columbia, up to which point the latter river is navigable to ships of large burden. It will be like Hang-chow on the Yellow river, a kind of Tripolis, of which one angle might be Oregon, the other Washington, and the third Columbia. But the growth of a great and commercial centre in such a position, and at such a distance from the central government, with the Rocky Mountains intervening, would be followed in the natural course of things by the detachment of the states on the Pacific board from the parent state, and Oregonians, Columbians, and Californians, will very probably, at some future day, avenge Great Britain for the covetous and overweening policy of the Americans in these far-off realms.

The policy thus persevered in has been grounded upon the purchase of Louisiana from France in the year 1808, and the acquisition of what titles of discovery and occupation might be possessed by Spain by the Florida treaty of 1818; but it is in reality guided by rights supposed or assumed to be conferred by the settlement of American citizens upon lands not occupied by Europeans, and by President Monroe's address to Congress in 1823, by which it was resolved that the American continent was henceforth not to be considered as subject to colonisation by any European powers.

It was natural that such preposterous claims on the part of the United States to rule the destiny of the whole continent of North America, were protested against by Great Britain and Russia, and the boundary dispute assumed the importance of a great political crisis, more than once threatening to result in war. Happily this was averted, and in 1844, by a further treaty, the details of which were settled at Washington by Mr. Richard Pakenham on behalf of the British government, the line of boundary from the Rocky Mountains to the sea was declared to be the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude, whilst the course which the line should take upon reaching the sea-fertile as it

has been in difficulties and misunderstandings-was declared to continue to "the centre of the Gulf of Georgia, and thence southward, through the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver Island, to the Straits of Juan de Fuca."

It was subsequently found that there were more than one channel existing between the island and the main shore, and contention arose as to the construction of the treaty in respect to them, and in the year 1856 the American government appointed a commission to settle this disputed line of boundary after it reached the sea-coast, as well as to determine the course which the parallel of forty-nine degrees took across the continent.

The British government also appointed commissioners for the like purpose. Captain Prevost was the first selected, and in the autumn of 1856 was ordered to commission H.M.S Satellite, and proceed to Vancouver Island. It was then discovered that no accurate chart of the channels in dispute between the island and the main shore existed; and that the position and extent of the group of islands among them were very imperfectly known; while the relative value of the channels themselves could only be arrived at from some such meagre information as the masters of two or three Hudson Bay Company's trading vessels were able to give. It was, therefore, determined that a surveying vessel should be despatched, in the first place, to make a complete survey of the disputed waters, and afterwards to continue it along the coasts of Vancouver Island and the mainland of the British territory. For this purpose Captain G. H. Richards—the present distinguished hydrographer at the Admiralty - was selected, and H.M.S. Plumper, afterwards relieved by the Hecate, was commissioned for the survey. The maritime part of the survey was, at a later period, further strengthened by a land boundary commission under Colonel Hawkins.

The Boundary Commissioners met with difficulties at the onset in regard to that part of the treaty of 1844 which has recently been referred to arbitration. The treaty, we have seen, stipulated that the boundary line should pass southward from the centre of the Gulf of Georgia, through the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver Island to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. All nautical men read this as meaning that starting from the centre of the Gulf of Georgia the boundary line would pass southward, down the centre also, of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver Island. But the Americans were not inclined to read the treaty in this sense. They explained the meaning as a boundary line extending due south, from an almost intangible point-the centre of the Gulf of Georgia-a line which, if strictly carried out, would almost have involved Feb.-VOL. III. NO. XIV.

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