Mr. Seward to Lord Lyons.
My Lord: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your lordship’s note of the 23d instant, in which you present a declaration made by James Murison in support of the claim of Messrs. William Anderson, Saxon & Company, of the Cape Town, for payment of some certain coal which was taken from the island of Angra Pequena by the ship Vanderbilt. I have taken a copy of this instrument for future reference, and, in compliance with your request, I send to you the original.
Her Majesty’s government, on behalf of the claimant, decline to furnish [Page 696] information of the object for which the coal in question was deposited by the claimants on a desolate and uninhabited island, outside of the sphere of civilized states. In place of giving the information desired by this government on that point, her Majesty’s government express the opinion that the coal might just as lawfully be sent to Angra Pequena for the purpose of supplying the wants of a so-called confederate ship-of-war as of a United States ship-of-war, and that for a United States ship-of-war to take, without payment, British property on a neutral shore, merely because it was intended to be sold by its owners to a ship-of-war of the other belligerent, would be an act of simple trespass, without justification from the law of nations.
This government is therefore left to infer, from these remarks, that the claimants placed their coal on the island of Angra Pequena for the use of the navigators of the Alabama. Her Majesty’s government are already aware that, in the opinion of the United States, the Alabama is not a lawful vessel of a lawful belligerent power, but a vessel built, manned, armed, and equipped in a British port, and put on the high seas by British subjects to make war against the United States in violation of the law of Great Britain, of treaties, and of the law of nations; and that this government, instead of holding itself under obligation to indemnify the pirates of the Alabama, is looking to the justice of Great Britain for indemnities from the many signal injuries which the citizens of the United States have sustained at the hands of British subjects who are engaged in that most unjustifiable enterprise. The claimants in the present case are regarded as having no more just claims upon the United States than the owners and crew of the Alabama have for indemnity for the losses they sustained in the destruction of that vessel in her combat with the United States ship-of-war Kearsarge.
I have the honor to be, with high consideration, my lord, your obedient servant,
Right Hon. Lord Lyons, &c., &c., &c.