not then in the public service, instead of leaving him to seek a publisher, on the 5th and 15th of June, 1848, at the instance of Mr. Ben ton, voted to print his geographical memoir on Upper California, [12] and the map of Oregon and *California, "according to the pro jection to be furnished by the said J. C. Frémont." Senate Miscellane 148, 30th Congress, 1st session. In representative governments, each branch of the legislature may order printed what it will; but the order gives no sanction to what is printed. Last winter, for example, the German Diet printed at the public cost, that the German constitution is not worth the paper it is written on. Neither Frémont nor Preuss had ever been' ous Documents No. Within many hundred miles of the straits of Fuca, and Frémont himself says, "The part of the map which exhibits Oregon is chiefly copied from the works of others." The Senate never saw the map as delivered to the lithographer. The work was printed, not under the revision of officers of the Senate, but solely "subject to the revision of its author." Except for the regions which he had himself explored, Frémont abandoned the drawing of the map to Preuss, Appendix No. 51, Who followed "other authorities." While Mr. Preuss was compiling his map, Mr. Bancroft, the representative of his country in London, with full authority from the President and Secretary of State of the United States, delivered to the British Government in the clearest words the declaration of his own Government that the boundary line passes through the middle of the Haro channel. Any error of Mr. Preuss was therefore perfectly harmless. p. 62, 1, 5, 6, p. 63, L 9, 10. And under any circumstances what authority could attach to a draught by Mr. Preuss? He was one of the many adventurers who throng to the United States, a mechanic, possessing no scientific culture, and holding his talent as a draughtsman at the command of any who would employ him. The United States are unable to inform the Imperial Arbitrator what authority served as a guide to Mr. Prenss when he drew the Oregon boundary to suit British pretensions. Not Mr. Benton; his opinion was well known. Not the Senate, which is the only permanent body under our Constitution, and which, in the twenty-five years since the treaty was made, has inflexibly maintained the right of the United [13] States to the *Haro boundary. Not Mr. Buchanan, the Secretary of State, whose instructions on the Haro as the boundary, sanctioned by the President and his cabinet, date from the year in which the treaty was made. Neither could Preuss have copied the line from printed materials. No such printed materials existed at that time. A wish expressed by the British minister at Washington slumbered in the Department of State, and was known only to the President and his cabinet. Mr. Preuss is no longer living to explain by whom he was misled. Mr. Frémont remembers that Mr. Preuss had among his materials a copy of a manuscript map of the northwest territory by the Hudson's Bay Company, received from one of its officers. Be this as it may, it is enough for the United States to have shown that the map never had the sanction of any branch of their Government. Analogous mistakes have been made in Great Britain, and under weightier authority. Pending the discussion between the two countries, Messrs. Malby & Co. of London, "manufacturers and publishers to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," sent out a large and splendid globe, on which they assigned to the United States by line and color the whole northwestern territory up to the latitude of 54° 40′, To treat mistakes like these as important is unsuited to negotiations between great powers. The United States do not complain that the map of Preuss is produced by Her Majesty's Government, for the production of it is a confession of the feebleness of the British Case. They might complain that Her Britannic Majesty's Government did not state what it hoped to prove by the map. They might complain that it produced the map without an acknowledgment of its well-known worthlessness as an exposition of American opinion. And above all they might complain of the British Government for submitting the map to the Imperial Arbitrator without avowing that its own archives contain a con[14] temporaneous, explicit, and authoritative declaration from the American Government, that the straits of Haro are the boundary channel of the treaty of 1846. II. REPLY TO THE ARGUMENTS OF THE BRITISH CASE. Having thus drawn attention to the character of the paper which the Government of Her Britannic Majesty has presented as its Case, its allegations in support of its pretensions are next to be examined. The Government of Her Britannic Majesty presents but one argument, and that argument has two branches. The British Government admits, and even insists, that the channel of the treaty must be a continuous channel from the forty-ninth parallel to the straits of Fuca; and it argues, first, that the strait which is now called Rosario, but which, at the time of making the treaty of 1846, had "no distinguishing name," must have been the channel contemplated by the treaty, because the British, at that time, "had no assurance" that the canal de Haro "was even navigable;"" had a firm belief that it was a dangerous strait;" and, secondly, that Fuca Straits extend from Cape Flattery to Whidbey Island. In discussing these two points their order will be reversed. 66 First, then, do the straits of Fuca, as now pretended by Great Britain, reach to Whidbey Island? The answer depends in part on the definition of the word "strait." Her Majesty's Government forget that the word applies only to a narrow passage connecting one part of a sea with another." Such is a lesson taught by all geographers, whether British, or French, or American, or German. As soon as the southeast cape of Vancouver Island is passed, the volume of water spreads into a broad expanse, filled with numerous islands, and becomes a gulf or bay, but is no longer a strait. Neither can it be pretended that any exception takes place in the geographical usage of the name "straits of Fuca," as employed [15] in all the scientific explorations and maps previous to June, 1846. On the contrary, the pretension is hazarded in the face of them all. The first map of the strait is by the pilot Lopez de Haro; on that the mouth of the so-called strait of Rosario is named Boca de Fidalgo, and the water to the south of it bears the name of the gulf of Santa Rosa. Map J Map K The map of Eliza, in 1791, confines the name of the straits of Juan de Fuca to the straits that separate Vancouver Island on the south from the continent; and that officer in his report repeats the name of the gulf of Santa Rosa as the name of the interior waters. The explorers in the Sutil and Mexicana, alike in the Spanish chart of 1795, and in the map annexed to the publication of their voyage in 1802, call the straits "Entrada," a Spanish word that can extend to no more than an entrance. Map L Map C. Next came Vancouver, and the great authority of the British navigator overthrows the British argument beyond room for cavil; for he not only, like all his predecessors, confines the name of Straits of Juan de Fuca to the passage between Vancouver Island on the south and the continent, but, alike in his narrative and on his map, expressly distinguishes those straits from "the interior sea," which he, with great solemnity, named the gulf of Georgia. Map E. The map of Duflot de Mofras, of 1844, and that of Wilkes, in 1845, confine the name of the straits of Fuca strictly to the waters that really form a strait between the continent and the southern line of Vancouver Island. The government of Her Britannic Majesty cannot produce one single map older than 1846 in defense of its views. pp. 103, 104. The common use of language among the British in Vancouver still Appendix No. 66, corresponds with the undivided testimony of the maps. Pemberton, surveyor-general of Vancouver Island, in a work published in 1860, writes thus of a "stranger steaming, for the first time, eastward into the straits of Juan de Fuca :" *“On his right hand is Washington Territory; on his left is Vancouver Island; straight before him is the gulf of Georgia." [16] Appendix No. 66, P. 103. The statement of Commander Mayne is, if possible, still more precise. Of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, he writes in these words: "At the Race Islands the strait may be said to terminate, as it there opens out into a large expanse of water." Now the Race Islands, or Race Rocks, alike on the British and American maps, lie to the southwest of the channel of Haro. On the point in question there could be no better authority than Commander Mayne, as he is a man of science, and was employed on the surveys during the period in which Captain, now Admiral, Prevost and Captain Richards acted as the British Boundary Commissioners. But to refute the British assumption, we need not go outside of the British Case itself. On page 27 it claims the chart of Vancouver as the chart according to which Her Majesty's Government framed the first article of the treaty, and then most correctly says: "The British Case, p 27. name of the gulf of Georgia is assigned on that chart to the whole of the interior sea." Thus this branch of the argument offered by the British Government is in flat contradiction to the proper use of language, to nature, to the concurrent testimony of every competent witness, and is given up before the end of the very paper in which it is presented. We now come to the other branch of the British argument: that prior Appendix Nos. 53, to 1846 there was no assurance that the canal de Haro was 54, 55, 57, 58, 61. even navigable. That channel is now universally acknowl edged to be the best and most convenient for the British. It forms the only line of communication regularly used by them. The mail steamers take only that route. It is the broadest, it is the deepest, it is the shortest passage; and so it is the only one used by the government, the traders, the immigrants, and inhabitants of British Columbia. It became [17] the exclusive channel as soon as gold-hunting *lured adventurers to that region, and the navigation of those waters was no longer confined to the vessels coasting from one to another of the trading. posts of the Hudson's Bay Company. Its superiority appears alike from the chart of the British Admiralty and of the American Coast Survey. A map is annexed exhibiting in several cross-sections the relative depths of its channel. Мар М. The plea of ignorance on the part of the British up to 1846 is irrele |