The Passamaquoddy Bay Treaty, 1910: A Diplomatic Sideshow in Canadian-American Relations

Abstract

w't Ao,wous s.s. ov eaLaJames Bryce, Britain's ambassador the United States, put his signature the Passamaquoddy Bay Treaty. Though a little treaty, hidden by the half dozen or more other treaties and agreements that had virtually cleaned the diplomatic slate of all Canadian-American ills remaining after the Alaska boundary decision in 1908, it was not without significance. As Bryce jubilantly wrote Earl Grey, Canada's Governor General, ... our frontier from the Atlantic the Pacific is fixed and settled. x In the ambassador's opinion, the issues that had prevented settlement of the boundary were irksomely slight, involving little more than the ownership of a patch of rock and a few acres of mud; yet this treaty was one of the most diffi- cult that he and the State Department had had negotiate. The Passamaquoddy Bay Treaty delineated that portion of the Maine-New Brunswick border that had lain unmarked for one hundred and twenty- seven years, the 25.2-mile water line stretching from the mouth of the St. Croix River the Bay of Fundy. The origin of the problem was seated in the fuzzy description of the international boundary given in the Treaty of Paris, 1788. According Article m, the line was to be drawn along the middle of the river St. Croix, from its mouth in the Bay of Fundy its source, awarding the United States all islands which were located within an invisible twenty-league line extending due east from the iuncture of the St. Croix with the Bay of Fundy, but excepting such islands as now are, or heretofore have been, within the limits of the... province of Nova Scotia?