Page:Narrative of an Official Visit to Guatemala.djvu/468

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448
HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL

and that, in the Note of the 29th July, with which the Minister of State accompanied the said decree to the Intendant of the department of Magdalena, it is definitively stated as not belonging to Colombia; and that, farther, the Guatemalian Envoy to Colombia, in his communication of the 28th September, says, with relation to the subject, that he has been assured that the Government of Colombia "had had no other idea than that of preventing the formation of Establishments on the said coast." Nevertheless, the question has not yet been definitively arranged.

By a treaty dated Versailles, the 3rd of September 1786, British settlers were allowed the privilege of cutting mahogany and logwood on that part of the Honduras shore which now constitutes the colony of Belize. In the treaty alluded to, there is no sovereign right made over to his Majesty to that territory, and I have understood that the boundaries between that settlement and the then Spanish Colonies,