This alliance facilitated the settlement of the Nootka business. After the failure of Vancouver and Quadra to agree in 1792 as to what should be surrendered at Nootka, the Governments took up the matter again. While the negotiations for this purpose were in progress a long letter from Revilla-Gigedo, the Viceroy of Mexico, reached Madrid. This was the informe of April 12, 1793, to which reference has frequently been made. Godoy, the Spanish prime minister, wrote to the Viceroy that in view of this and other letters from the same source he had concluded a convention with St. Helens.[469] In this long letter the Viceroy, after having given a brief history of the Spanish operations on the Northwest Coast, and especially the Nootka expeditions, gave an extended discussion, the purpose of which was to show that Nootka was not worth retaining. He dwelt on the millions that had been spent during the past twenty-five years in erecting and sustaining new establishments in Upper California, and discouraged attempts to occupy more distant places. He indorsed the idea of settling the Straits of Juan de Fuca and southward, but he thought that settlements farther north would be a cause of anxiety and fruitless expense and would afford occasions for quarrels and misunderstandings with England. If England wished to maintain possession of Nootka as a point of honor, he declared that Spain ought to yield to her. He proposed a generous surrender of the post to the English.[470]
The convention to which Godoy referred as having been concluded by himself with the British ambassador was signed at Madrid on January 11, 1794, and was as follows:
_Convention for the mutual abandonment of Nootka._
Their Catholic and Britannic Majesties desiring to remove and obviate all doubt and difficulty relative to the execution of article 1 of the convention concluded between Their said Majesties on the 28th of October, 1790, have resolved and agreed to order that new instructions be sent to the officials who have been respectively commissioned to carry out the said article, the tenor of which instructions shall be as follows:
That within the shortest time that may be possible after the arrival of the said officials at Nootka they shall meet in the place, or near, where the buildings stood which were formerly occupied by the subjects of His Britannic Majesty, at which time and in which place they shall exchange mutually the following declaration and counter declaration: