The Gtiiana Boiindary 51 zuela's evidence and the nearly two thousand of Great Britain's as- well, as those who wished the judges uninfluenced by earlier con- clusions could prefer them to be. That it is not my purpose to discuss anew the whole of this evi- dence or the arguments by which it was made to serve the interests of either party I need not say. I have read it all afresh and for its re-weighing have skipped no page of case or argument, not even of the four or five thousand printed pages in which the French com- positor has done what he could to make unintelligible the pleas be- fore the judges at Paris ; but while leaving uncorrected no palpable slip brought to light in the work done for the American Commis- sion, my aim is rather to point out, without debate, the content of the evidence newly found and the light it seems to throw on the doings and relations of Spaniards and Dutch in Guiana. I cannot bring myself to turn from this study without the passing remark that no American has cause for aught but pride, at least as regards historical knowledge and insight, in the part played by his country- men, whether as counsel or as judges, in the great lawsuit. I shall the better reach my aim if my treatment frankly follows that of the American report. Let me, then, deal first with the earliest relations of Spanish and Dutch in Guiana, next with the adjustment of these at the peace of Westphalia, and with the rights and claims of the Dutch West India Company, then with the suc- cessive advances by the Dutch into the Essequibo and its neighbor rivers of western Guiana and with their claims in this quarter, and finally with the counter-advances and the rival claims of the Span- iards. As to the period prior to the last decade of the sixteenth cen- tury no fresh evidence was offered either by Great Britain or by Venezuela. Both countries frankly relinquished all assertion of European settlement in Guiana before this date. The Venezuelans still urged with vigor the Spanish discovery and exploration of these coasts, and their British opponents, in belittling these, were able to point out a serious slip in the work of the American experts ; ' > It was, I am happy to add, the 07ily such slip they pointed out, and they cleverly made the most of it The error was a mistaken reading (American Commission's Re- port, III. 175, 1S9, 190) of a manuscript note on an old Spanish map of Guiana. The note tells of a certain Arawak cacique, who in the year 1553 went up the Essequibo and descended on the other slope to the Amazon. The blunder lay in failing to notice that the mention of the cacique belonged to the note, and the consequent conjectural ascrip- tion of the exploit to "some unnamed explorer — presumably the Spaniard whose explo- rations the map is meant to illustrate." What made the slip easy was that the map bears elsewhere, in several places, names of Indian caciques ; that the " Afio 1553 " which in this case follows is preceded by a period (after the fashion of the sixteenth centurj') ; and that a couple of near-by notes begin likewise with a date. But the blunder was
