The British Calcutta Council condemns the Treaty…

Serious negotiations begin between Britain, France and Spain (for which Britain's chief negotiator is Alleyne Fitzherbert, and Spain's the Count of Aranda) over the next few weeks.

Although a French naval expedition had destroyed British trading posts in Hudson Bay during the summer, no territory had actually been captured.

From time to time, news arrives from India of continuing stalemate, both in the land wars (which involve the French only as supporters to local rulers) and in naval battles; the British still appear to hold all the French territory there that they had captured in 1778–79, while the French hold no British territory.

In the West Indies, on the other hand, the French still hold all the territory they had captured, while the British hold only one French island, St. Lucia.

The Spanish hold West Florida, the Bahamas and Menorca, and they are still maintaining an increasingly futile siege of Gibraltar.

An attempt to exchange Puerto Rico for Gibraltar collapses, probably because it would have brought too much competition for Jamaican products into the protected British market.

France and Britain, in the preliminary treaties signed with France and Spain on January 20, 1783, return to each other nearly all the territories they had taken from each other since 1778, except for Tobago, which the French had captured in 1781 and are allowed to keep.

France also gains some territory around the Senegal River in Africa, which it had lost to Britain in 1763.

The whole arrangement for fishing around the Newfoundland coast has to be renegotiated because of the rights awarded to the Americans.

The Spanish do much better.

They do not have to hand back West Florida or Menorca, and are also given East Florida in exchange for the Bahamas (so tens of thousands of refugees who had fled to East Florida from the United States will have to move again).

Both East Florida and part of West Florida had been Spanish possessions before 1763, so the 1783 treaty does not specify boundaries, allowing the Spanish to claim that the 1763 boundaries still apply (the remainder of West Florida had been part of French Louisiana before 1763, and the rest of Louisiana had then been handed over to Spain).

The opportunity is taken to resolve long-standing disputes about logwood cutting in Central America.

The British, however, continue to hold Gibraltar after the siege is abandoned.

France is an ally of both the United States and Spain, but Spain was not an ally of the United States, though an informal alliance had existed since at least 1776 between the Americans and Bernardo de Gálvez, Spanish governor of Louisiana, one of the most successful leaders in the war.

Spain's economy depends almost entirely on its colonial empire in the Americas, and a successful revolt by subjects of another colonial empire could set a ruinous example.

In fact, there had been a series of three rebellions by native South Americans against Spain between 1777 and 1781, led by Tomás Katari, Tupac Amaru II, and Julian Apasa (who adopted the name Tupac Katari)—all had been crushed with utter ruthlessness.

With such considerations in mind, Spain had continually thwarted John Jay's attempts to establish diplomatic relations during his long assignments in Madrid, and is the last participant in the American Revolutionary War to acknowledge the independence of the United States, a fortnight after the preliminary peace treaty with Britain, on February 3, 1783.

The Dutch had never captured anything from the British, and only French military action had saved them from losing virtually all their colonies.

They can exercise no leverage over Britain, Spain, France or the United States in the peace negotiations, and do not make a preliminary treaty until September 2, 1783, the day before the other three treaties are formalized.

Britain agrees to return nearly all Dutch possessions captured in the East Indies (the most important of which, Trincomalee on Ceylon, had already been retaken by the French anyway) but keep Negapatnam on the Indian coast, and secure other concessions.

The terms of the peace, particularly the proposed treaty with the United States, had caused a political storm in Britain.

The concession of the Northwest Territory and the Newfoundland fisheries, and especially the apparent abandonment of Loyalists by an Article which the individual States would inevitably ignore, had been condemned in Parliament.

The last point had been the easiest solved—British tax revenue saved by not continuing the war will be used to compensate Loyalists.

Nevertheless, on February 17, 1783 and again on February 21, motions against the treaty had been successful in Parliament, so on February 24 Lord Shelburne had resigned, and for five weeks the British government had been without a leader.

Finally, a solution similar to the previous year's choice of Lord Rockingham had been found.

The government was to be led, nominally, by the Duke of Portland, while the two Secretaries of State were to be Charles Fox and, remarkably, Lord North.

Richard Oswald had been replaced by a new negotiator, David Hartley, but the Americans have refused to allow any modifications to the treaty—partly because they would have to be approved by Congress, which, with two Atlantic crossings, would take several months.

Therefore, on September 3, 1783, at Hartley's hotel in Paris, the treaty as agreed by Richard Oswald the previous November is formally signed, and ...

...at Versailles the separate treaties with France and Spain are also formalized.

French chemist Pierre-François Chabaneau was born in 1754 in Nontron, a village in the Dordogne department of France.

His uncle, a member of the order of Saint Anthony, had encouraged him to study theology.

While Chabaneau excelled in his studies, his distaste for metaphysical speculation had led him to antagonize his teachers, which in turn had caused him to be expelled from school.

Sympathetic towards Chabaneau's state of poverty, the director of a Jesuit college in Passy had offered him a position as a mathematics professor, despite Chabaneau having only a basic understanding of arithmetic.

In studying the material for the next day's lessons, Chabaneau taught himself algebra and geometry.

His academic interest soon spread to physics, natural history, and chemistry.

At the age of twenty, Chabaneau had been convinced by the brothers Fausto and Juan José Elhuyar to join the newly established Real Seminario Patriotico at Vergara to teach French and physics.

The brothers Elhuyar, who would soon make a name for themselves by isolating metallic tungsten, are the sons of the Count of Peñaflorida, who had sent them to France to find professors for the Vergara Seminary.

After the Elhuyar brothers isolated metallic tungsten in 1783, Chabaneau had collaborated with them in researching platinum.

This did not last long, though, as the brothers had been appointed Directors General of Mining, and soon left Spain for South America.

King Charles III had created a public chair of mineralogy, physics and chemistry for Chabaneau in Madrid and provided him with a laboratory for his research.

The Count d'Aranda had secured the government's entire supply of platinum for Chabaneau's laboratory.

Chabaneau has been able to easily remove most of platinum's natural impurities, including gold, mercury, lead, copper, and iron, leading him to believe that he is working with pure platinum.

However, the metal displays inconsistent characteristics.

At times it is malleable; at times it is highly brittle.

Sometimes it is entirely incombustible, yet sometimes it burns readily.

These inconsistencies are a result of various impurities: rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and ruthenium.

These elements will later come to be known as the platinum group metals, but at the time of Chabaneau's research, they have not yet been discovered.

So frustrated was Chabaneau by his research that, in 1786, he had lost his temper and smashed all of his equipment, exclaiming, "Away with it all! I'll smash the whole business; you shall never again get me to touch the damned metal!"

Nevertheless, three months later, Chabaneau had presents the Count d'Aranda with a ten centimeter cube of pure malleable platinum, obtainable only upon purification to essentially pure metal.

His process, involving powder metallurgy and intense heating, will be kept secret until 1914.

Chabaneau had realized that the sheer difficulty of working with platinum would lend value to objects made from it.

A chalice made from malleable platinum is presented to Pope Pius VI in 1789.

He and Don Joaquín Cabezas carry on a lucrative business producing platinum ingots and utensils.

This marks the beginning of what is now known as the "platinum age in Spain," during which nearly 18,000 troy ounces of malleable platinum will be produced in a span of twenty-two years.

The platinum age will end in 1808 when Chabaneau's laboratory is destroyed during Napoleon's second invasion.