Señor Ojeda to Mr. Hay.
Washington , December 22, 1902 .
Mr. Secretary: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note of the 17th instant, in which you were good enough to inclose a copy of the letter addressed by the mayor of Pensacola to the governor of Florida, in regard to the remarks I laid before your excellency in my note of the 5th instant, about the searching of the Spanish steamer Leonora and the arrest of its master.
I have taken due note of its contents, and in reply have to say to your excellency that this legation did not assume to call in question the justice of the charge brought against some of the crew of the steamship Leonora or the proceedings taken against those men in connection with the charge. The fact which the undersigned deemed it his duty to bring to the attention of the Federal Government, and now deems it his duty to do so again, to the end that the proper remedy may be applied, is that the authorities, municipal or others, of the United States should have searched a vessel of a friendly country without the intervention or representation of the latter’s consular authority, which by international usage is invited, as is done in Spain in the case of American vessels and to the best of my information has always been done in the United States with seamen of Spanish vessels under similar circumstances.
[Page 966]I therefore ask that your excellency will be so good as to give consideration to that phase of the question to which my note of the 5th instant had mainly reference, whose great importance will, I am sure, be appreciated by your excellency as much as by myself.
I avail, etc.,