from entering Paraguayan waters. This incident, and the role of Water Witch in further exacerbating American-Paraguayan relations, will be described later. The claims of the Rhode Island company Back in the United States the company that Hopkins represented got up a claim against Paraguay. This claim was afterwards adjudicated, see below, by a two-person international commission comprising an American and a Paraguayan arbitrator. The arbitrators agreed that the Rhode Island company's claim was worthless. However, this was not determined until August 1860. Meantime, the Rhode Island company got up a campaign. It asserted that it had been wronged and damaged by the Republic of Paraguay to an amount in excess of a million dollars. It was in reference to this claim that President Buchanan said Paraguay had "seized and appropriated the property of American citizens residing in Paraguay, in a violent and arbitrary manner". Summary The claim by the Rhode Island company that they were arbitrarily ruined by the Paraguayan government, later adjudicated as worthless, was, therefore, one of the three official causes for sending the Paraguay expedition. Refusing to ratify the friendship treaty Paraguay had a history of feeling disrespected by its larger neighbors Brazil and Argentina` and welcomed recognition by third countries. Recently, in 1853, Paraguay had negotiated treaties of friendship, commerce and navigation with Great Britain, France, Sardinia and the United States, and looked forward to the ratification of the latter by the U.S. Senate. These four treaties were almost word-for-word the same, and contained most favored nation clauses. Owing to the carelessness of a visiting American diplomat, many formal mistakes got into the wording of the U.S.-Paraguay treaty, e.g. the U.S.A. was referred to as "United States of North America"; so the U.S. Senate required these be corrected. A corrected version was prepared for Paraguay to ratify. By the time the document arrived in South America consul Hopkins had departed, and no American diplomat was available to formally present it to the Paraguayan government. So the responsibility was given to Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Page, commander of USS Water Witch Following the Hopkins incident in which he was conveyed out of Paraguay by USS Water Witch (September 1854), an angry President López was in no mood to ratify, and Water Witch had been banned from Paraguayan waters. Lieutenant Page sent an officer to Asunción by commercial steamer to hand-deliver the corrected version of the treaty. However, an