L MAKING THE TREATY 61 British Minister to Washington, and work upon the draft of a treaty was begun by him and Mr. Clayton. It was while this work was in progress that news came of the British seizure of Tigre Island, and the Democratic majority in the Senate, quite willing and perhaps eager to embarrass the Whig administration, demanded the immediate consideration of Mr. Squier's treaties with Nicaragua and Honduras, and asked the President for all letters and papers relating thereto. This request was refused, "on grounds of public policy," because such disclosure of documents might embarrass important negotiations then pending; and then, in order to strengthen that argument for refusal, Mr. Clayton urged Sir Henry Bulwer to conclude the treaty at once. Sir Henry suggested as a preliminary that the United States Government should disavow and cancel Mr. Squier's treaty with Honduras and his acquisition of Tigre Island, in return for which the British Government would disavow and undo its agent's seizure of that Island. This was done, and there upon the famous Clayton-Bulwer treaty was concluded, signed, sent to the Senate, and ratified. (See Appendix II.) It provided that neither the United States nor Great Britain should exclusively control the Nicaragua canal or build any fortifications along it; that neither should ever take possession of, fortify, colonise, or exercise dominion or protection over any part of Central America; that they should mutually guard the safety and neutrality of the proposed canal, and should invite all other nations to do the same; that both should give aid and support to any satisfactory company which would construct the canal; and that thus a general principle should be established for application to all Isthmian canals or railroads, at Panama or Tehuantepec as well as at Nicaragua. On the face of it this seemed a splendid thing, and the treaty was generally applauded. But there was something deeper than the face of it. Even before the treaty was ratified, the British Government informed the United States that it did not interpret the provisions of the treaty as applicable to the existing British settlement in Honduras "or its dependencies," to wit, the Bay Islands and the Mosquito coast. In other words, Great Britain was to be confirmed in all her disputed claims in Central America, and was thus to be enabled to do to a great extent the very things the treaty forbade the United States to do. In this Mr. Clayton practically acquiesced, and so the treaty, which was signed on April 18, 1850, was ratified on July 5, 1850. The treaties negotiated by Messrs. Hise and Squier were cancelled, and the Clayton-Bulwer treaty became the supreme law of the land. Meantime various schemes of canal construction arose, only to be defeated by the circumstances established by this very treaty whose ostensible object was to promote the enterprise. The Republic of Costa Rica had Andreas Oersted, a Danish engineer, in 1847, survey a Nicaragua canal route which instead of running to the Bay of Fonseca should reach the Pacific through Costa Rican territory. Stephen Bailey proposed another route in the same general region. Immediately after the ratification of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, Colonel O. W. Childs, a distinguished American canal engineer, was sent to Nicaragua, where he laid out an entirely new route, having its Pacific terminus at Brito. His plans were approved by the War Department at Washington, and also by British official engineers, and formed the basis of the actual attempt which was made in after years to construct a canal in Nicaragua. But all these enterprises were hampered and frustrated by political considerations. Friction and disputes arose between the United States and Great Britain over the interpretation and application of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. Great Britain intrigued with Costa Rica and opened the way for a boundary dispute between that country and Nicaragua. Presently, the republics of Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras united in a federal league, while Guatemala and Costa Rica remained aloof, the latter almost openly hostile to the combination. L WRANGLING OVER THE TREATY 63 President Pierce and his Secretary of State, William L. Marcy, took up the controversy with Great Britain, sending Solon Borland as a special agent to Central America and James Buchanan as Minister to England, with instructions to insist upon such construction of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty as would require Great Britain to withdraw from the Mosquito Coast. This demand Lord Clarendon, the British Foreign Minister, met with a flat refusal, to which he added that the British Government would not recognise the Monroe Doctrine as international law, and would not consent to be questioned further by the United States concerning her original rights in Central America. The American answer to this should have been immediate notice of abrogation of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. Instead, our Government contented itself with bombarding, in the interest of Cornelius Vanderbilt's company, the British-Mosquito settlement of Greytown, at the mouth of the San Juan River. Then Walker, the filibuster, began in 1855 his nefarious operations in Nicaragua, and affairs in all that part of America became chaotic. In Honduras some further work was done toward establishing satisfactory interoceanic transit. A British concern known as the Honduras Interoceanic Railway Company was organised in 1854, and secured a concession for its route across that country. Diplomatic complications ensued, however, among Honduras, Great Britain, and the United States, with the result that by 1857 all plans and operations were practically shelved. There followed some futile diplomatic passages between Great Britain and the United States, in which abrogation of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty was threatened by this country, but was not effected; and then Great Britain made a highly profitable series of treaties with various Central American States, taking advantage of the facts that Walker's filibustering had aroused much prejudice against the United States in those countries, and that the United States was, moreover, too much concerned with its own domestic troubles and impending civil war to pay much attention to its southern neighbours. The climax of these diplomatic achievements of Great Britain was the negotiation, in 1860, of a treaty with Nicaragua, in which Great Britain, with an appearance of much magnanimity, agreed to abandon her protectorate over the Mosquito Coast, and to hand the whole of that region back to Nicaragua, in return for which Nicaragua was to acknowledge the validity of the claims which were thus relinquished. In fact the British withdrawal was only nominal, and the sovereignty restored to Nicaragua was the merest shadow, for it was stipulated that if Nicaragua attempted to make her sovereignty fully effective Great Britain should have the right to intervene under a title whose validity and sufficiency Nicaragua had now herself admitted. CHAPTER V SOME FUTILE SCHEMES WHILE Great Britain and the United States were wrangling over their ill-made treaty, another French essay was made in Nicaragua. Louis Napoleon had temporarily abandoned his canal scheme in favour of his imperial coupd'état, but he took it up again during the Anglo-American deadlock following the ratification of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, in a way which caused some concern. At the time of Walker's filibustering operations, one Felix Belly, an enthusiastic French adventurer and promoter, organised a company for the construction of a canal along Oersted's route, through Nicaragua and Costa Rica. He played strongly upon local sentiment in those countries by exploiting the evils of Walker's raids, publicly declaring that thitherto all the official agents of the United States in Nicaragua had been accomplices and auxiliaries of Walker and other fili busters; and in order to protect Nicaragua from any more such outrages he proposed that the canal, if not, indeed, the whole country, should be placed under the protection of the European powers which had just guaranteed the integrity of the Turkish empire, to wit, France, Great Britain, and Sardinia. Working with shrewd pertinacity along such lines, Belly persuaded the Nicaraguan and Costa Rican governments to adjust their boundary disputes, and then, in May, 1858, to grant him a canal concession for ninety-nine years on the Oersted route. He was to have all the privileges which had been enjoyed by the American Atlantic and Pacific Canal Company, and in addition that of stationing two French warships in Lake Nicaragua. At this the United States Government was aroused, and it warned Nica |