[13] The Merchant Proprietors to John Meares, esq., Commanding the _Felice_ and _Iphigenia_, China, December 24, 1787. (Id., Appendix I.)
[16] Meares, Memorial, Appendix to Voyages. He explains that this ruse was at first successful, but was later discovered through the financial failure of the Portuguese merchant who had allowed his name to be thus used.
[17] Dixon, Further Remarks on Meares’s Voyages, 55. His hostility to Meares prejudices any statement made by him. See above, p. 287, note b [10].
[18] Bancroft, Northwest Coast, 1, 193. This author devotes some 10 pages to a discussion of this expedition.
Greenhow, Oregon and California, 172-178, attempts to prove that the expedition was purely Portuguese. His account is too prejudiced to be of much value. The chief purpose of his book was to prove that America had a better claim to the Oregon country than England. If this expedition had been purely Portuguese, England could have acquired no possible claim through it.
[21] Id., 104. This date should probably be changed to May 12. When the English and Spanish not at Nootka in 1789 their calendars were one day apart. (See below, p. 312, note a [82].) Since there are no conflicting dates given for the events at Nootka in 1788, those found in the journals of the English commanders are followed.
[23] The purchase is confirmed in the information of William Graham, London, May 5, 1790 (inclosure No. VI, with Meares’s Memorial, appendix to Voyages). It was also confirmed by Duffin in conversation with Vancouver in 1792. (Vancouver, Voyages, II, 370-372). Both of these have strong English prejudices. The purchase is denied by Gray and Ingraham. (Greenhow, Oregon and California, 414.) They strongly favored the Spanish. They say that the Indians denied having sold land to the English. That there was a purchase was practically conceded, however, even by the Spaniards, since Quadra offered to Vancouver in 1792 the land on which Meares’s house had stood in 1788. (See Vancouver, Voyages, II, 335 ff.)
[26] Greenhow, Oregon and California, 175.
[31] Meares, Voyages, 173, and Memorial in appendix.
[34] Greenhow, Oregon and California, 172; and Bancroft, Northwest Coast, I, 194.
[35] Dixon, Further Remarks on Meares’s Voyages, 24. This writer, in his controversial pamphlet, quotes from a letter of Captain Duncan, who had met Meares near the entrance to Nootka Sound in 1788. This letter makes the statement that Meares had “at that time a small vessel on the stocks at Nootka, where, he told me, he had a fort, guns mounted, and Portuguese colors flying.” It was written January 17, 1791, and can hardly be given absolute credence, since Dixon was so prejudiced against Meares. Greenhow is too partisan to be fair, and the Americans, Gray and Ingraham, and Haswell, whom Bancroft quotes on the point, were very pro-Spanish. On the other hand, Meares’s statements can not be taken for truth unless it is very plain that there is no reason for his telling anything else.