ABSTRACT
In the American Historical Review, XLIII, No. 2, January 1938, 288-9, Miss Goebel challenges Stratford Canning's statement. Miss Goebel comments that hitherto “ Canning’s claim has been accepted at its face value”, but that “any such statement is false. She adds that the statement “falls to the ground under the weight of the evidence of earlier years” etc. The matter is of some interest because Canning was a disciple of publicity, and would have been unwise to make any statement in public which either Spain or France could refute. On 25 January 1810 Henry Wellesley wrote to the Marquess Wellesley that there had been much agitation among British merchants for placing the Spanish American trade on a proper footing. The Anglo-Spanish Convention of 1822 afforded redress to British vessels seized by Spanish ones, and was thus a formal and official confirmation of the “tacit” permission already accorded to British trade with the Spanish colonies.
