PEACEMAKER: ‘From Tepic [Nayarit, Mexico] came a description of the most intelligent + ambitious British plan to colonized California, from Dr. Wyllie to William Hartnell’

With dignified asperity, Richard Hartnell decried such publications as Forbes’s California as “tending to induce ignorant and weakminded farmers, without further inquiry, to embark themselves and families to a country still subject to war, rapine, and disorder.”  Canada and other colonies established by Great Britain in the traditional way seemed to Cousin Richard the suitable goal for English emigrants.  In conclusion he maintained that Texans and Californians always will “sympathize more with their republican slave-holding mama than with their monarchical antislave-holding grandmama.”

Robert Wyllie had been visited by Richard Hartnell in Texas.  In correspondence with William, Robert discussed and disclaimed the prejudices which so violently colored their London cousin’s point of view.  But family feeling prompted his offer to defend Richard when a libel suit was threatened by angered Texans, claiming he had mentioned them by name in a superior, insulting manner.  Fortunately, wrote Wyllie, “it came to nothing.”

From Tepic on August 10, 1843, came a description of the most intelligent and ambitious British plan to colonize California, from Dr. Wyllie to William Hartnell, who were each to play a prominent part.  How Richard Hartnell, who would have ranted on reading such a letter from one outlandish cousin to another, in direct opposition to foreign office policy!

‘I have for years been a member of the Committee in London of the Spanish-American Bondholders, and have taken an active part in all their transactions.

‘By an arrangement with the Bondholders in 1837, the Mexican Debt was divided into about 5,000,000 pounds active bearing 5 per cent interest and about 5,000,000 deferred, bearing no interest till the first of October, 1847, but up to that date, at the option of the H0lder exchangeable for land at the rate of 5 shillings per acre, in payment of which the bonds were to be received at par with 5 per cent interest from the first of October, 1837, to date payable in so much more land, at the same price.  In guaranty of this arrangement, so advantageous to Mexico, its Government hypothecates 100 millions of acres of vacant lands in Texas, Chihuahua, New Mexico, Sonora and California; and the Bondholders stipulated for and obtained a further amount of 25 millions of acres of land in the Departments nearest to the Atlantic.’

[Pages 260 - 261  of Susanna Bryant Dakin's history of Alta California, The Lives of William Hartnell]