50 University of California Publications in History

ter of conjecture, as it is uncertain whether there had been an
understanding of delimitation between those two Powers. Certain
writers present evidence suggesting the existence of such an agree-
ment, employing Prince William Sound, in latitude 61 north, as
the division point.* But none has yet proved it.
 The uncertainty of the Spanish attitude is shown in the various
suggestions of Viceroy Juan Vicente Revilla Gigedo (the second
viceroy of the name). He at one time proposed an Anglo-Spanish
boundary running straight north from the westernmost point of
the Strait of Juan de Fuea ; a year later he instructed Bodega to
seek a settlement along the Forty-eighth Parallel;" and still later,
"narrowing his pretensions, [he] urged that Spain cease straining
for the Pole and be content with a boundary at the Columbia River
or Bodega Bay, either of which, assuming Anian [the much sought
mythical strait through the continent] to exist, might be its out-
let."" None of these proposals developed into a treaty of limits, how-
ever. The Russians proceeded with the organization of the Russian
American Fur Company, which was active below Prince William
Sound, the point suggested as a boundary." Russia eventually
issued a provocative assertion to an extensive title in 1821, when a
ukase of the Czar declared land and sea above the Fifty-first Paral-
lel a closed sphere. But after four years' negotiations this claim
was modified by treaties with the United States and England."
 Thus it was that, while England and Spain agreed to leave their
 titles undefined, at the same time the Russian affronts to Spanish
 sovereignty were resented. They were not, however, answered by
 any definite published agreements between those two countries.
 Into such a kaleidoscope of territorial interests there entered a
 fourth Power in the 1780's. The New England traders whom Mar-
 tinez found at Nootka in 1789 were the vanguard in a series of
 expeditions which were to lead to the provisions of treaties with
 England in 1818 and with Spain in 1819 giving the United States
 an ocean-to-ocean frontier.
 The picturesque and active enterprises of the Massachusetts
 seamen early came to include stops on the North Coast on the
 route to China. Furs picked up there could be exchanged for luxu-
 ries in the Orient more cheaply than merchandise brought from
 the Atlantic Coast. One of the captains, Robert Gray, wintered at
 Nootka while on the first "round-the-world" voyage to be made by