THE DISPUTED TERRITORY

On this map the Schomburgk Line is laid down in conformity with the claims of Great Britain as to its proper position. By the arbitration Great Britain lost the two strips of land within that line indicated on the map by shaded sections, one at the mouth of the Orinoco and the other between Yuruan and Mt. Roraima. Those shaded sections comprise about 5000 square miles, an area a trifle larger than the State of Connecticut, and represent what Venezuela gained in territory within the Schomburgk Line as defined by Great Britain. Venezuela’s political gain consisted in the complete control of the mouth of the Orinoco, the natural outlet to nearly all of Venezuela and of a large part of Colombia.—EDITOR.

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There was in truth a store of gold in the land; the explorers carried stories of their new wealth back to Spain, and before the end of the sixteenth century Sir Walter Raleigh, with a body of English adventurers and certain Dutchmen, visited Guayana in quest of treasure. The Dutch West India Company planted a settlement near the mouth of the Essequibo about the year 1624, and was strong enough to hold it against the Spaniards, who up to that time had been in undisputed possession. The title of the Dutch to the territory upon which they had established themselves was confirmed by the treaty of Münster in 1648, in which Spain recognized the Netherlands as free and independent states. Early in the last century England captured from the Dutch their settlements of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo, and in the treaty of 1814 these were formally ceded to her. Thus British Guiana came into being. On the one hand, therefore, Venezuela, when she revolted from Spain in 1811, became vested with the title to all the territory which Spain had held by virtue of discovery and exploration save the districts she had ceded to the Dutch; while, on the other hand, England held British Guiana by cession from the Dutch, who had acquired it from Spain by the treaty of Münster.

In that treaty Spain and Holland had not been at pains to draw the boundary line between Guayana, now British Guiana, and the Captaincy General of Caracas, now Venezuela, and from that act of omission arose all the trouble. For many years after England entered into lawful possession of British Guiana by the treaty of 1814 no dispute over the undefined boundary arose. With the running of what is called the Schomburgk Line in 1849 begins the unbroken chain of events that led to the boundary controversy, brought it to a critical stage, called forth the message of December, 1895, and culminated in the finding and award of the Paris tribunal.

In 1841 the British engineer Sir Robert Schomburgk was commissioned by his Government to ascertain and fix by metes and bounds the line between British Guiana and Venezuela. Then began Venezuela’s protest, and then, too, began the singular migrations of the Schomburgk Line. Lord Aberdeen abandoned it in 1844, but in 1886 it was laid down in British official publications as having made a wide detour to the west, the British maps presenting to the eyes of the Venezuelans a startling incursion upon territory they had supposed to be their own by undisputed title. “The Statesman’s Year Book” of 1885 stated the area of British Guiana to be 76,000 square miles. In 1887, according to the “Year Book,” the area of the colony had expanded to 109,000 square miles. Nor was this the limit of the westward sweep of British pretensions, for in 1890 England obligingly consented to arbitrate her title to a vast tract of territory embracing thousands of square miles wholly outside the Schomburgk Line, and, a circumstance that has oftener explained than excused England’s land hunger, including within its boundaries some of Venezuela’s richest gold mines.

The protests of Venezuela and her appeals for justice became insistent. She demanded an arbitration of the British claims, and her demands meeting with refusal, in 1887 she broke off diplomatic relations. Our aid was invoked by her, and Secretary Bayard tendered our good offices to promote a friendly settlement. Great Britain firmly refused to arbitrate the question except upon the basis of an antecedent concession to her of a very large part of the territory in dispute, including the mouth of the Orinoco and all territory within the extended Schomburgk Line. Meanwhile the Venezuelans grew more and more uneasy as they observed the behavior of British war-ships in and near the mouth of the Orinoco, and the acts of British subjects asserting and exercising rights of occupation and settlement upon territory they held, and rightly held, to be their own.

This was the situation when Secretary of State Richard Olney addressed to Ambassador Bayard in London, on July 20, 1895, that letter of instructions which the British ambassador at Washington described as a “fiery note.” Another British authority called it “Olney’s hectoring note.” Lord Salisbury, very much at his ease, and taking his time about it, replied to this note on November 26. He explained that “it could not be answered until it had been carefully considered by the law officers of the Crown.” It may be recalled that Earl Russell, before making reply to the vigorous protest of our minister, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, against the fitting out of the Alabama in a British shipyard, referred the matter to the “law officers of the Crown.” One of these learned gentlemen having unfortunately lost his mind, there was a delay of some days, of which the Alabama took advantage to escape the jurisdiction by putting out to sea. As the decision of the law officers, when tardily rendered, was that the ship must be seized, it would appear that England should lay the responsibility for the Alabama award of $15,500,000 that she paid to us upon the too deliberate working of her legal machinery.

Secretary Olney in his letter, which of course Mr. Bayard was instructed to lay before Lord Salisbury, had embodied all the substantive declarations of the Monroe Doctrine, and in the very words of Mr. Monroe’s message of 1823. The first fruit of the doctrine, he pointed out, was the independence of South America, for it was to the European Powers banded together in the Holy Alliance, and then preparing to assist Spain in the recapture of her revolted colonies, that Monroe addressed his warning message. Every administration since Monroe’s had given its sanction and indorsement to the doctrine. It had been successfully invoked to put an end to the empire forced upon the Mexican people by Napoleon III, and now it was upon no general justification of interposing in a controversy between two other nations, but specifically upon the Monroe Doctrine, that we based our remonstrance against Great Britain’s high-handed ways with Venezuela.