ny excuse save the direct villainy of her government, or
the corrupt ignorance of her subordinate officers.

* * * * *

We must now retrace our steps, in order to narrate an event of interest
in the series of causes that originated this war.

It appears that the Mexican government, in anticipation of some attack
on its distant territories of California, had, in the summer of 1842,
sent a number of troops thither, under the command of Don Manuel
Micheltorena, who was appointed commandant general and inspector of both
the Californias. These troops arrived at San Diego, the southernmost
port on the Pacific side of California, in the middle of October, and
were on their way to Monterey, the capital, when the occurrences in
question took place.

Monterey, on the Pacific, is a small village founded by the Spaniards in
1771, at the southern extremity of a bay of the same name, near the 36th
degree of latitude, about a hundred miles south of the great bay of San
Francisco, and about three hundred and fifty miles north from the town
of Angeles, where the Commandant Micheltorena was resting with his
troops when the events in question occurred.

Whilst Commodore Jones was visiting the port of Callao, in September,
1842, he received from Mr. John Parrott, our consul at Mazatlan, a copy
of a Mexican newspaper of the 4th of June, containing three official
declarations against the United States, which he regarded as "highly
belligerent."[25] He also obtained a newspaper published in Boston,
quoting a paragraph from the New Orleans Advertiser of the 19th April,
1842, in which it was asserted,--upon what the editor deemed authentic
information,--that Mexico had ceded the Californias to England for seven
millions of dollars. These documents reached our sensitive commodore at
a moment when his suspicions were aroused by other circumstances. For,
on the 5th of September, Rear-Admiral Thomas, a British commander,
sailed from Callao in the Dublin having previously despatched two of his
fleet with sealed orders just received from England. The whole fleet, he
believed, was secretly on its way to Panama to embark reinforcements of
troops, from the West Indies, to take armed possession of the
Californias in conformity with the allegation of the Boston and New
Orleans editors.[26]

Commodore Jones immediately hastened from the port of Callao to Lima,
where, in a conversation with the American charge d'affaires