The Guiana Boundary 55 Thome by the Dutch in 1629, " other squadrons of corsairs came and settled and fortified themselves in the arms and creeks of the river Orinoco " as well as in the island of Tobago, and that " infor- mation has been received that the same or another squadron was coming this year to take possession of the city and of a quicksilver mine which is said to have been discovered close to it on the bank of the said river Orinoco ;" (2) a memorandum by Don Juan De- sologuren, dated in November 1637 at the same Spanish- American capital, wherein, relating the expulsion of the Dutch from Tobago by the Spaniards in 1636 and their taking refuge in the Essequibo and the Berbice, he asserts that " on the river Orinoco itself, and on its most important mouth, in the same part of the mainland as the set- tlement of Santo Thome de la Guayana, at thirty leagues' distance from it, there were ten Dutch waiting for reinforcements to fortify themselves from the year 1636 ;" (3) some eight or ten documents of the Spaniards of Orinoco in 1637 and 1638, whose testimony goes to support that already published as to the presence of Dutch- men in the Amacura immediately before and after the renewed Dutch sack of Santo Thome in 1637. Just what faith, in the ab- sence of all confirmation from Dutch sources, these Spanish rumors deserve, it is not easy to know ; but it can no longer be doubted that they have a basis of fact.' That there was on the part of the Dutch West India Company, however, any thought of settlement here, is, in view of the silence of its records, hardly to be believed ; and side by side with the documents just described is produced a letter written to the King of Spain in 1634 by the Bishop of Porto Rico, who, making now his first pastoral visitation in Guiana (which seven years before had been transferred to his diocese), reports the interesting news that Santo Thome " had been removed, for rather more than a year, six leagues distant from where it used to be, in order to occupy a more concealed position on the river Orinoco, and one not so unhealthy, beside which the place is better de- fended against the Dutch," and who urges especially upon His Maj- esty the necessity of better protecting his colony from these foes, yet expressly names as the nearest post of the Dutch that on the Essequibo. No fresh evidence has thrown new light upon the purpose or the interpretation of the disputed clauses of the Treaty of Miinster. The British advocates persist in seeing in them an express admis- sion of a right of the Dutch to all conquests they could make in America ; while their opponents, going to the opposite extreme, would make them an express grant to the Dutch of what they had ' The suspicion uttered in the American Commission's report (I. 294), that they may rest on an error, must therefore be withdrawn.
