In 1841 the British engineer Sir Robert Schomburgk was commissioned by his Government to ascertain and fix by metes and bounds the line between British Guiana and Venezuela. Then began Venezuela’s protest, and then, too, began the singular migrations of the Schomburgk Line. Lord Aberdeen abandoned it in 1844, but in 1886 it was laid down in British official publications as having made a wide detour to the west, the British maps presenting to the eyes of the Venezuelans a startling incursion upon territory they had supposed to be their own by undisputed title. “The Statesman’s Year Book” of 1885 stated the area of British Guiana to be 76,000 square miles. In 1887, according to the “Year Book,” the area of the colony had expanded to 109,000 square miles. Nor was this the limit of the westward sweep of British pretensions, for in 1890 England obligingly consented to arbitrate her title to a vast tract of territory embracing thousands of square miles wholly outside the Schomburgk Line, and, a circumstance that has oftener explained than excused England’s land hunger, including within its boundaries some of Venezuela’s richest gold mines. The protests of Venezuela and her appeals for justice became insistent. She demanded an arbitration of the British claims, and her demands meeting with refusal, in 1887 she broke off diplomatic relations. Our aid was invoked by her, and Secretary Bayard tendered our good offices to promote a friendly settlement. Great Britain firmly refused to arbitrate the question except upon the basis of an antecedent concession to her of a very large part of the territory in dispute, including the mouth of the Orinoco and all territory within the extended Schomburgk Line. Meanwhile the Venezuelans grew more and more uneasy as they observed the behavior of British war-ships in and near the mouth of the Orinoco, and the acts of British subjects asserting and exercising rights of occupation and settlement upon territory they held, and rightly held, to be their own.