Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

When news of this confrontation in a once-quiet Northwest cove reached the governments of Europe, all rattled their swords and threatened war. At issue was far more than Nootka Sound as a base for lucrative fur-trading operations. The underlying international law principle was whether any nation—in this case Spain—could hold exclusive title to land by virtue of discovery alone. In a turn of events ominously predictive of the tangling alliances that later led to the First World War, Spain looked to aid from France, while England sought alliances with Prussia and the Netherlands. In the fledgling United States, President George Washington and his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, agonized over the prospect of England and Spain waging a global war centered upon the very landscape that they hoped to claim for themselves in due course. In the end, tensions cooled when England and Spain signed the Nootka Sound Convention on October 28, 1790. The Nootka Sound Convention was another of those treaties to which Russia was not a party, but which nonetheless cast a shadow over its future moves. In effect, Spain gave up its exclusive claim by right of discovery to the Pacific Northwest, and Spain and Great Britain mutually agreed that each country was entitled to trade and build settlements on those parts of the coast not previously occupied.