How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [32]
Public response in England to Meares’s carefully worded report was one of outrage. “The Court of Spain cannot be so devoid of understanding as to make a serious quarrel with this country upon so idle and ill-founded a pretence as her hitherto unheard of claim to the sovereignty of the seas to the northwestward of America,” London’s Woodfall’s Register exclaimed in 1790. “The Court of Madrid might, with as much reason, lay claim to the clouds, the stars, and the hemisphere.”
Not unlike today, the clamor was quickly exploited. Within a month, London’s Covent Garden Theatre had presented a topical play entitled Nootka Sound, or England Prepared. British militants accused Spain of creating a crisis to divert its people’s attention from democratic movements in other nations. In response, British peace advocates reminded their fellow citizens about the profitless war with Spain that had resulted from Robert Jenkins’s dubious account of a Spaniard lopping off his ear.3 (See “Robert Jenkins’s Ear” earlier in this book.)
Ultimately, England and Spain did not go to war. Instead, they signed an accord known as the Nootka Convention, which would later affect the locations of California, Nevada, and Utah’s borders with Oregon and Idaho. Under the Nootka Convention, Spain accepted the principle that a nation could not claim possession of land simply by having discovered it; rather, a nation must have established a permanent settlement on the land.
Nearly thirty years later, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams invoked the Nootka Convention in negotiations with Spain regarding the western boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase. By that time, an American settlement had been established at the mouth of the Columbia River in present-day Oregon. Adams cited that settlement as the basis for a border with Spain’s California settlements.4 Spain did not challenge Adams’s logic, though its representative quibbled with the boundary he proposed. Adams noted in his diary, “I showed him … the line offered in my note, upon which he only remarked that we might have taken the Columbia River from its source to its mouth, instead of the forty-first parallel of latitude.” In the 1819 Adams-Onis treaty that resulted, the boundary was fixed at the 42nd parallel. North of this parallel, virtually all the waterways flow to the Columbia River; south of it, virtually all flow to what was then Spain’s settlement at San Francisco.
42°: the watershed line
But England also invoked the Nootka Convention, claiming its right to possess Oregon, based on British settlements along the Columbia River and the waterways leading to it. Having just concluded the War of 1812, neither the United States nor England wanted to renew hostilities, so the two nations agreed jointly to hold Oregon, which at the time extended to Alaska. This joint occupancy lasted some twenty-five years, at which point an American rallying cry for the region—“Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!”—once again brought the United States and England to the brink of war during the presidency of James Polk.
As for John Meares, he went on to undertake what many in his situation would do today: he wrote a book.5 His adventures on the frozen seas with enemies from Spain and bullies from the British East India Company, combined with the tropical splendors of natives in Hawaii and the mysteries of Canton, made the book a longtime favorite of many readers. One dissatisfied reader, however, was George Dixon, who had captained one of the East India Company ships that had rescued Meares. Dixon took offense at being depicted as an extortionist. So he wrote a book, too:
This Day is published, price 3s.6d
Further Remarks on the Voyages of John Meares, Esq.
in which several important facts, misrepresented