of "the Bay Islands."
On the heels of this rumor came news that aroused widespread
indignation. A British man-of-war had fired upon an American steamer,
which had refused to pay port dues on entering the harbor of Greytown.
Over this city, strategically located at the mouth of the San Juan
River, Great Britain exercised an ill-disguised control as part of the
Mosquito protectorate.

In the midst of the excited debate which immediately followed in
Congress, Cass astonished everybody by producing the memorandum which
Bulwer had given Clayton just before the signing of the treaty.[398]
In this remarkable note, the British ambassador stated that his
government did not wish to be understood as renouncing its existing
claims to Her Majesty's settlement at Honduras and "its dependencies."
And Clayton seemed to have admitted the force of this reservation. For
his part, Cass made haste to say, he wished the Senate distinctly to
understand that when he had voted for the treaty, he believed Great
Britain was thereby prevented from establishing any such dependency.
His object--and he had supposed it to be the object of the treaty--was
to sweep away all British claims to Central America.

Behind this imbroglio lay an intricate diplomatic history which can
be here only briefly recapitulated. The interest of the United States
in the Central American States dated from the discovery of gold in
California. The value of the control of the means of transportation
across the isthmus at Nicaragua became increasingly clear, as the gold
seekers sought that route to the Pacific coast. In the latter days of
his administration, President Polk had sent one Elijah Hise to
cultivate friendly relations with the Central American States and to
offset the paramount influence of Great Britain in that region. Great
Britain was already in possession of the colony of Belize and was
exercising an ill-defined protectorate over the Mosquito Indians on
the eastern coast of Nicaragua. In his ardor to serve American
interests, Hise exceeded his instructions and secured a treaty with
Nicaragua, which gave to the United States exclusive privileges over
the route of the proposed canal, on condition that the sovereignty of
Nicaragua were guaranteed. The incoming Whig administration would have
nothing to do with the Hise _entente_, preferring to dispatch its own
agent to Central America. Though Squier succeeded in negotiating a
more acceptable treaty, the new Secre