When Roosevelt became President, a perplexing controversy with Great Britain over the boundary line between Alaska and Canada was in full swing. The problem, which had become acute with the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1897, had already been considered, together with eleven other subjects of dispute between Canada and the United States, by a Joint Commission which had been able to reach no agreement. The essence of the controversy was this: The treaty of 1825 between Great Britain and Russia had declared that the boundary, dividing British and Russian America on that five-hundred-mile strip of land which depends from the Alaskan elephant's head like a dangling halter rope, should be drawn "parallel to the windings of the coast" at a distance inland of thirty miles. The United States took the plain and literal interpretation of these words in the treaty. The Canadian contention was that within the meaning of the treaty the fiords or inlets which here break into the land were not part of the sea, and that the line, instead of following, at the correct distance inland, the indentations made by these arms of the sea, should leap boldly across them, at the agreed distance from the points of the headlands. This would give Canada the heads of several great inlets and direct access to the sea far north of the point where the Canadian coast had always been assumed to end. Canada and the United States were equally resolute in upholding their claims. It looked as if the matter would end in a deadlock. John Hay, who had been Secretary of State in McKinley's Cabinet, as he now was in Roosevelt's, had done his best to bring the matter to a settlement, but had been unwilling to have the dispute arbitrated, for the very good reason that, as he said, "although our claim is as clear as the sun in heaven, we know enough of arbitration to foresee the fatal tendency of all arbitrators to compromise." Roosevelt believed that the "claim of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the Alaskan coast is just exactly as indefensible as if they should now claim the island of Nantucket." He was willing, however, to refer the question unconfused by other issues to a second Joint Commission of six. The commission was duly constituted. There was no odd neutral member of this body, as in an arbitration, but merely three representatives from each side. Of the British representatives two were Canadians and the third was the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Alverstone.