5o8 Documents 2. Miranda and the British Admiralty, 1804.— 1806. In a former volume' we printed a group of papers which illus- trated Miranda's expedition of 1806 from the point of view of one of the minor participants and victims, a young American who was among those captured off Porto Cabello and imprisoned at Cartagena. The papers now printed, obtained from the Public Record Office at London through the kindness of Mr. Hubert Hall, F.S.A., illus- trate the same episode from another and a very interesting point of view, that of the British Admiralty. They are derived from the series of despatches sent to the Secretary of the Admiralty, William Marsden, by the admirals and other commanders on the North America, Jamaica and Leeward Islands stations, and that of the Cape of Good Hope, which at that time was generally understood to include the southeastern coasts of South America." Those num- bered II. to XIX., despatches and enclosures, including letters of Miranda, exhibit with great fullness and clearness the relations which the various British naval officers in American waters bore to his projects, the extent to which they aided him, and, indirectly, the attitude of the Lords of the Admiralty toward his designs. The chief documents hitherto printed illustrating this aspect of the episode are Admiral Cochrane's letter of June g, 1806, addressed to Miranda,'^ and the memorandum issued in July by Governor His- lop of Trinidad.* The document numbered I. has a special interest. It is a memo- randum drawn up by Captain, afterward Rear-Admiral, Sir Home Popham, after a conference with Pitt and Melville in October, 1 804, a few months before the outbreak of war with Spain. It casts light upon the mutual connection between the various schemes for the revolutionizing of Spanish America which the British government, for both political and economic reasons, from time to time enter- tained ; and in particular upon the connection between the attacks which Miranda in Venezuela and Popham and Beresford at Buenos Ayres were almost simultaneously making.^ The thought of the emancipation of Spanish America had been suggested to the British mind by Governor Pownall in his Memorial 1 III. 674-702. We have since learned that other portions of Henry Ingersoll's diary are possessed by the Boston Athenaeum. See Third Report of tlie Historical Manuscripts Commission, A. H. A. 1898, p. 574. 2 This was disputed ; but see the Report of the Trial of Sir Home Popham, London, 1807, p. 102. ^Antepara, South American Emancipation, London, iSio, pp. 213-215.
- ^ Edinburgh Rez'iew, January, 1S09, XIIL 295.
5 Also illustrated by Miranda's letter to the cabildo of Buenos Ayres, in Antepara, pp. 273. 274-
