Mr. Buchanan to Mr. Bancroft.1 1

Sir: I have obtained from the Navy Department, and now transmit to you, in accordance with the request contained in your dispatch No. 1, (November 3,) the traced copy of Wilkes’s chart of the Straits of Haro. This will enable you to act understandingly upon any question which may hereafter arise between the two Governments in respect to the sovereignty of the islands situate between the Continent and Vancouver’s Island. It is not probable, however, that any claim of this character [Page 246] will be seriously preferred on the part of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government to any island lying to the eastward of the Canal of Arro, as marked in Captain Wilkes’s Map of the Oregon Territory. This, I have no doubt, is the channel which Lord Aberdeen had in view when, in a conversation with Mr. MacLane about the middle of May last, on the subject of the resumption of the negotiation for an amicable settlement of the Oregon question, his Lordship explained the character of the proposition he intended to submit through Mr. Pakenham. As understood by Mr. MacLane, and by him communicated to this Department in his dispatch of the 18th of the same month, it was: “First, to divide the territory by the extension of the line on the parallel of 49° to the sea; that is to say, to the arm of the sea called Birch’s Bay, thence by the Canal de Haro and Straits of Fuca to the ocean,” &c.

I am, &c.,

JAMES BUCHANAN.

George Bancroft, Esq., &c., &c., &c.

[Inclosure: Chart of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, &c. By the United States Ex. Ex., 1841.]

  1. As officially printed in the United States.