from beginning to end:
the accounts for the maintenance of French and Dutch prisoners were,
in the first instance, wrongly drawn up; and there seems to have been
little or no notion of the seriousness of the counter-claim, which
came with all the effect of a volley from a masked battery,
destructive alike to our diplomatic reputation and to our hope of
retaining Tobago.

It is impossible to refer here to all the topics discussed at Amiens.
The determination of the French Government to adopt a forward colonial
and oceanic policy is clearly seen in its proposals made at the close
of the year 1801. They were: (1) the abolition of salutes to the
British flag on the high seas; (2) an _absolute_ ownership of the
eastern and western coasts of Newfoundland in return for a proposed
cession of the isles of St. Pierre and Miquelon to us--which would
have practically ceded to France _in full sovereignty_ all the best
fishing coasts of that land, with every prospect of settling the
interior, in exchange for two islets devastated by war and then in
British hands; (3) the right of the French to a share in the whale
fishery in those seas; (4) the establishment of a French fishing
station in the Falkland Isles; and (5) the extension of the French
districts around the towns of Yanaon and Mahe in India.[188] To all
these demands Lord Cornwallis opposed an unbending opposition. Weak as
our policy had been on other affairs, it was firm as a rock on all
maritime and Indian questions. In fact, the events to be described in
the next chapter, which led to the consolidation of British power in
Hindostan, would in all probability never have occurred but for the
apprehensions excited by these French demands; and our masterful
proconsul in Bengal, the Marquis Wellesley, could not have pursued his
daring and expensive schemes of conquest, annexation, and forced
alliances, had not the schemes of the First Consul played into the
hands of the soldiers at Calcutta and weakened the protests of the
dividend-hunters of Leadenhall Street.

The persistence of French demands for an increase of influence in
Newfoundland and the West and East Indies, the vastness of her
expedition to Saint Domingo and the thinly-veiled designs of her
Australian expedition (which we shall notice in the next chapter), all
served to awaken the suspicions of the British Government. The
negotiations consequently progressed but slowly. From the outset they
were clogged by the susp