But far from being merely a dispute over a few captured vessels and a comparatively unimportant trading post, it was the decisive conflict between two great colonial principles, of which England and Spain were, respectively, the exponents. Spain still clung to the antiquated notion that the fact of the Pacific Ocean’s having been first seen by a Spaniard gave his Government a right to all of the lands of the continent which were washed by it. This fact, added to the gift of the Pope, was sufficient to convince the Spanish mind that Spain had a valid title to the whole of the western coast of both Americas. On the other hand, England had long been acting on the now universally accepted principle that mere discovery is an insufficient title, and that land anywhere on the globe not controlled by any civilized nation belongs to that nation which first occupies and develops it.
The controversy is of further importance because of the fact that it tested the triple alliance of 1788 between England, Prussia, and the Netherlands. It also afforded the occasion for overthrowing the Bourbon family compact of 1761. It marked the end of Spain’s new brief period of national greatness, which had resulted from the wise reign of Charles III. It was also the beginning of the collapse of Spain’s colonial empire. Duro, one of the leading Spanish historians of the present, says that it inaugurated a period of degradation disgraceful to Spanish history, and began a series of pictures which cause anyone to blush who contemplates them with love for the fatherland.[4]
The settlement of the controversy determined the subsequent position of England and Spain on the Northwest Coast. Later, after the United States had bought the Spanish claim, the Nootka Sound affair became a part of the Oregon controversy. For a time the dispute threatened to change the course of the French Revolution.[5] It menaced the existence, or at least the expansion, of the United States. It promised to substitute English for Spanish influence in Latin America.
THE ENGLISH PLANS FOR OCCUPYING NOOTKA SOUND.
As early as 1785 instructions were given looking toward the establishment of an English trading post on Nootka Sound. In this year an English commercial company instructed the commander of one of its vessels to establish a post on the northwest coast of America for “securing the trade of the continent and islands adjacent.” King Georges [Nootka] Sound was suggested as being “in every respect consistent with the intent of forming such establishment.”[6]