RESTORATION OF ASTORIA until the long-lost
307
North West Company documents are discovwhich will probably be in
unless burned, or destroyed,
ered,
some cellar or attic in Montreal. They are not in London, nor have they ever been in the possession of the Hudson's as stated by
Bay Company,
in a letter of 1825, after the
Edward
Ellice to that
Company
two companies had merged and
company made inquiry regarding the papers of
the English
the Nor'westers.
The year 1815 was
a busy one for the Americans, as the Aside from the economic problems involved by the great European wars, a rumor was out that Spain had again ceded the Floridas to Great Britain in payment for British
saw
it.
16
money loaned during the war in the Peninsula. Secretary Monroe was very anxious about it. That year, also, there was the war with the Dey of Algiers. The Indians were also on the rampage, on the northern and western the Floridas.
The
British noted
it.
And
frontiers,
and
in
the determination
seems to have become stronger at Washington to have the future of the United States troubled with as few neighbors as possible, and that meant controlling a larger section of the North American continent. War had broken out also in
South America, where Spain was fighting her badly-treated colonists.
A
bill
appeared again in 1816; but the public were paying
moment. seemed to have been By reached, as shown in a letter from Sir James Lucas Yeo, written from H. M. S. Inconstant, Spithead, 30th August, 1817, to John Wilson Croker, Secretary of the Admiralty, London. 17 The sympathies of the United States were with the Spanish insurgents, he wrote, especially in Florida, trade was at a standstill, and Americans said to be in close touch with the Spanish insurgents on the Pacific. The United States were little
attention to the Columbia, at that
1817, decisions
"indefatigable in training the militia and have i6F. O.
s,
Vol. 106.
17 F. O.
s,
Vol. 128.
Baker
to
Foreign Office.
removed every
