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