Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/48

 38 RALPH S. KUYKENDALL is concerned. To Greenhow and Bancroft and Manning that which relates to the Sandwich Islands is purely in- cidental. But the present writer has approached the sub- ject from the point of view of Hawaiian history, in an attempt to verify the assertion that the Princess Royal was surrendered to Colnett at the Hawaiian Islands. At the outset it may be said categorically that this assertion is not true. The writers who make it cite as authority a passage from a book written by Colnett him- self. 6 Colnett, however, does not claim that the Princess Royal was surrendered to him. All that he says on this particular point is contained in the following sentence in a footnote on page 101 of his book: "At length after thirteen months captivity, we obtained permission to sail, with orders to go to Nootka, and take possession of the Princess Royal, whose crew I had with me, although the Spaniards must have known it was impossible for me to have fallen in with her there, as appeared by the orders which the Spanish Commander had on board, when I met with him by accident sometime afterwards at the Sand- wich Isles." If one may hazard a guess, it seems probable that Greenhow, knowing that Colnett had an order from the Viceroy calling for the delivery of the Princess Royal to him, simply assumed that when he found the vessel the delivery was made, even though the meeting was acci- dental and under circumstances altogether different from those presupposed in the order. Bancroft and Manning have apparently been misled by Greenhow. The subject proposed for the present study may be best treated under three divisions: (1) the operations of Colnett from the time of his release to the time of his meeting with the Princess Royal at the Sandwich Islands; (2) the movements of the Princess Royal during the 6 A Voyage to the South Atlantic and Round Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean. . . Undertaken and Performed by Captain James Colnett, of the Royal Navy, in the Ship Rattler. London, 1798.