His first advances were made to the British.
He proposed to put the new empire, no matter what shape it might assume, under British protection, in return for the assistance of the British fleet in taking New Orleans.

He gave to the British ministers full--and false--accounts of the intended uprising, and besought the aid of the British Government on the ground that the secession of the West would so cripple the Union as to make it no longer a formidable enemy of Great Britain.

Burr's audacity and plausibility were such that he quite dazzled the British minister, who detailed the plans at length to his home government, putting them in as favorable a light as he could.

The statesmen at London, however, although at this time almost inconceivably stupid in their dealings with America, were not sunk in such abject folly as to think Burr's schemes practicable, and they refused to have anything to do with them.
He Starts West and Stays with Blennerhassett.
In April, 1805, Burr started on his tour to the West.

One of his first stoppages was at an island on the Ohio near Parkersburg, where an Irish gentleman named Blennerhassett had built what was, for the West, an unusually fine house.