Accordingly, on 28th October 1790 (after four days, not three), the Court of Madrid signed the Convention which opened up a new future for the North Pacific. By it Spain agreed to restore the buildings and lands at Nootka to the British subjects whom Martinez had dispossessed. Reparation was also to be made for any outrages committed by the subjects of either Power against those of the other since April 1789.[958] Britons and Spaniards were to have full liberty to trade in North-West America, that is, to the north of the Spanish settlements; but of course all the coasts to the south of them were to remain closed as heretofore. Spain, however, conceded entire freedom of navigation and fishery in the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas, except that, in order to preclude all intercourse with her colonies, British ships were forbidden to approach within a limit of ten maritime leagues.
The British public greeted this happy issue of events with characteristic reserve. As Spain stood for commercial monopoly and political reaction, the rebuff dealt to her ought to have pleased the Whigs. But party rancour increased in proportion to Pitt’s success. Hope deferred made the hearts of his opponents sick; and to this cause we may attribute curiously acrid verdicts like that of Auckland’s correspondent, Storer, who exclaimed on 22nd October, with the jauntiness of ignorance: “Here we are, going to war, and for what? A place, the name of which I can scarcely pronounce, never heard of till lately, and which did not exist till t’other day. Pitt is tired of peace. He bullied France so effectually three years ago that he is determined to try the same thing with Spain.” Storer also says that our officers were in high spirits at the idea of a voyage to Mexico, and were buying Ulloa’s “Voyage” so as to study the South Sea coasts.[959] Whence it would appear that geography was not a strong point with Storer, and that in his eyes wars were worth waging only on behalf of well-known names. How curiously parochial is this habit of mind. Yet Pitt was destined soon to find out its self-assertiveness and tenacity in the case of another un-euphonious and dimly-known place—Oczakoff.
The insular, matter-of-fact way in which the House of Commons viewed Pitt’s diplomatic triumph received apt illustration in the debate of 14th December, when Duncombe and Alderman Watson moved and seconded a resolution of thanks to His Majesty for the Convention with Spain. They dwelt on the advantages of the peaceful settlement which it secured, and augured well for the increase of British trade to the South Seas. But Pulteney declared that we had won too much from Spain, and should ever feel her ill will. Besides, a Pacific whale was worth only £90, as against £170 for a Greenland whale. Alderman Curtis fell foul of these statements in a maiden speech “which possessed all the blunt characteristics of commercial oratory.” He said that he himself was a fisherman, and gloried in the character. He rejoiced to state that more ships than ever before were now fitting out for whaling in the Pacific; and he himself had sold Pacific whale-oil for £50 a ton, while the Greenland oil fetched only £18 or £19 a ton. Mr. (afterwards Earl) Grey sought to raise the debate from these blubbery platitudes to the levels of diplomacy; and, differing from his friend Pulteney, censured the Convention because it gained us nothing; for it laid down no definite limits in those new lands, and it granted us access to them conjointly with the Spaniards. Consequently, where our traders settled on one hill, the Spaniards might build a fort on another close by. Windham then censured Ministers because they had secured neither adequate reparation to our outraged honour nor definite rights to our traders. Thereupon a General Smith opined that the Convention was of no advantage to us, because the people of Nootka Sound were “a species of cannibals.” In other respects it was “disgraceful to the real interests of the country”—an assertion which Rolle and Ryder proceeded to refute, on the ground that the result had been well worth the three and a half millions spent on naval preparations. (In reality the sum was £2,821,000.)
Fox also wandered deviously until he caught at a possible clue, that offended honour was the only justifiable cause for war. In this case, he declared, Ministers had not gained for us due reparation. It fell infinitely short of what was obtained in the dispute about the Falkland Islands in 1771.[960] Further, we now gained no material advantage from Spain; for British ships had sailed into the South Seas despite the Spanish laws; and the receipts from that trade had grown in five years from £12,000 to £97,000. (He omitted to state that previously that trade had been killed by the war with Spain.) He next asserted that we secured little or nothing in the North Pacific, because the limits of Spanish America were still left vague, and we gave up the right of settlement on the coasts of South America. In fact, the treaty was one of concessions, not of acquisitions. This, he added, was on a par with our foreign policy as a whole; for our new ally, Sweden, had come to terms with Russia behind our backs, thus lowering us in the eyes of the world; and we had failed to coerce Russia. “In our words was confidence: in our acts was fear.”
Pitt in his reply had little difficulty in proving that the present case differed entirely from that of the Falkland Islands, and that the treaty secured for us trading rights which Spain had hitherto always contested. There was therefore every ground for hoping for a great increase of trade to the Pacific. The House agreed with him by 247 votes to 123. But in Pitt’s speech, as in the whole debate, we find no wide outlook on events. The arguments are of the Little Peddlington type; and, after wandering through those teasing mazes, one feels a thrill of surprise that the British people ever came out into a large and wealthy place. The importance of Pitt’s triumph has received scant notice at the hands of historians. Macaulay, in his brilliant sketch of Pitt’s career, dismissed the affair in the clause—“England armed, and Spain receded.” Lord Rosebery remarks that the settlement of the affair was honourable for England, and not dishonourable to Spain. Even Stanhope and Lecky on their far ampler canvases merely described the terms of the settlement without revealing its momentous results.[961]
Far different were the judgements of enlightened Spaniards. They saw in the treaty of 28th October the beginning of the end of their world-empire. The official Junta at Madrid protested vehemently against the surrender on the ground that it “conceded to England what has always been resisted and refused to all Powers since the discovery of the Indies.” Herein lies the significance of the Spanish defeat. Their Empire rested on monopoly. It is little to the point to say that English traders occasionally ventured into the Pacific. They did so at their peril; and the recent revival of Spanish power threatened to rivet once more the chains of privilege on that vast domain. Now that they were shattered, the whole cramped system was doomed to fall. Just as the irruption of Cromwell’s fleet into the Spanish West Indies in 1654 sounded the knell of Spanish domination in those seas, so too the signing of this Convention presaged the end of their Empire in the Pacific. The advent of the Union Jack on equal terms with the red and yellow flag of Spain has always implied the retreat of the latter. In religion, commerce, and political life the two ensigns represent ideals so utterly at variance that they cannot wave in friendly neighbourhood. One or other must go: and the primacy of Pitt and Godoy sufficiently explains the advance of the one and the retreat of the other in the ensuing years. In one other respect the crisis was important. The British archives show that the Courts of Madrid and St. Petersburg were then making overtures which would probably have led to the complete appropriation of that coast-line; and the interlocking of those two rigid systems might have implied the exclusion for ever of the British flag from the Pacific coast. No one, not even Pitt himself, could foresee the rich harvest of results one day to be reaped from his action in that summer and autumn. The winning of a few log huts at Nootka Sound seemed a small thing then. But in this age of the triumphs of steam and electricity we can discern its importance in world politics. The infant settlement on Vancouver Island, and on the mainland opposite, inspired the pioneers of Canada with hope as they threaded their way through the passes of the Rockies and the Selkirks. Possibly one of them
like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific,
caught a glimpse of a strange future, when Canada, the child of Richelieu, would enter into the northern heritage of old Spain, and become a Pacific Power.
All this lay enfolded in the winning of that inlet. Nay, more. We can now see that British Columbia holds in the West a strategic position not unlike that of Egypt in the Orient. Both are vital links in our chain of communication. Pitt, could he have known it, helped to fashion the keystone of the arch of Empire in the Occident. He played his part manfully in preparing for a day when Canada would stretch hands across the seas to India and Australia; when the vivifying forces of science and commerce would endow with a common life the conquests of Wolfe and Clive, and the lands discovered by Captain Cook.