27th Nov.
In an article in the last number of the Asiatic Quarterly Review on " Asia on the Pacific and the Behring Sea," Mr, Hyde Clarke recalls some records of the early settlement of the north-west coast, of America by the English, which the Foreign Office, he hints, have entirely overlooked in the controversy with Mr. Blaine. In the earlier part of the article the writer discusses the traditional friendship between the United States and Russia, which has always seemed an anomaly to those who thought that friendship necessitated some similarity, and that it could not exist between two countries, of which the government of one was the most free, and of the other the most despotic, in the civilised world. It was due first to the spite against England and Englishmen after the War of Independence, and the desire to get a naval power as an ally, and later to much more trivial causes. 'I'he American visitor to London at the end of last and the beginning of this century was treated coldly, and as a mere provincial, while he was loaded with courtesies at St. Petersburgh. 'I'his is now all changed: the United States have conquered Lo: don society, and the American visitor to London "moves among his own duchesses and leaders of fashion."
But to come to the Bebiring Sea question, "One cause of obscurity," says Mr. Hyde Clarke, "is, that the phrase Behring's Sea is a new importation into geography, adopted by the American Secretary of State for a special purpose of proposing it as a close sea, or mare clausum. In older maps the name is not to be found, but Behring's Straits and the Sea of Kamchatka. Another circumstance is, that New Albion and Nootka Sotind, the seat of the English settlement founded in the last century, have disappeared from present maps." This, by the way, is hardly accurate, as Nootka Sound will be found duly marked on modern maps—we may instance John Bartholomew's little Pocket Atlas—on the west coast of the island of Vancouver. It was in 1579 that
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.