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118. The whole attention of Spain was therefore directed to this point. For a long time, she claimed a right to an exclusive dominion over the vast oceans, which surrounded her American possessions; and this right she asserted, to the utmost extent, wherever she was enabled to do so by a superiority of maritime force.

Few are, I believe, aware of the length, to which these pretensions were carried. I shall therefore subjoin, in order to illustrate them, some extracts from a correspondence which took place, as late as 1790, between Don Teodoro de Croix, then Viceroy of Peru, and the Governor of the Island of Juan Fernandez, who was disgraced, and narrowly escaped a severer punishment, for having, in that year, allowed a vessel from the United States, which had lost her rudder, and been otherwise damaged by a storm, to put into the harbour for a few days to refit.

The Viceroy expresses, in very strong terms, his displeasure at the negligence of the Governor, in allowing the vessel to leave the Island, "without having even attempted to seize her; and his surprise at the Governor of any of the King's Islands being so ignorant, as not to know, that any foreign vessel sailing in the South Sea, without a Spanish license, was to be treated as an enemy's vessel, although the country, to which she belonged, might be at peace and amity with Spain."

This doctrine met with the entire approbation of