full of "the outrage upon our traders in those distant seas."
Four years Lord Palmerston and Count Nesselrode had been diplomating over the privileges of that shorestrip. Four years Dr. McLoughlin had been piling up supplies that the Russians would have been glad to purchase. "Let us go to Europe and settle it," wrote the governor on the Columbia to the governor at Sitka.
To some who did not understand the doctor's statesmanship, and he kept his secrets to himself and Douglas, there were other reasons for that long and tedious trip to London.
Some said that Sir George Simpson had complained that Dr. McLoughlin favored the American missionaries. Sir George Simpson, so the Hudson's Bay gossips said, had prepared the London Board to give the doctor a "wigging "for the high hand he held on the Columbia; but when that stately form darkened the doors in Fenchurch Street the king of the Columbia was weighed at his true value, a veritable monarch come out of the West.
It was a stately occasion when the delegates of the Russian American Fur Company of St. Petersburg met the delegates of the Hudson's Bay Company in a London council and discussed matters usually relegated to the cabinets of kings. The difficulty was adjusted. " And now," said McLoughlin, "we want to lease that ten-league strip of Russian seaboard."
Lord Palmerston and Parliament wondered if the Hudson's Bay Company wanted the earth. Already it controlled an extent of territory greater than all Europe, of what value could be a barren bit of shore on that lonely northwest coast? Dr. McLoughlin knew its value better than the Russian Directory, better than
