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'The Sovereignty of the Sea'

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the North Sea to the shores of Flanders and Holland, was as completely under the dominion of the King of England as Kent or Yorkshire. To fish in those waters, or even to navigate them without his permission, was an encroachment on his rights.' 'Monstrous' as the claim was, says Mr. Gardiner, its appeal to the English contempt of foreigners was too strong to be without an echo in the hearts of Englishmen. The preposterousness of the claim, when it is viewed in all the length and breadth of its extremest pretensions, may be admitted as freely and denounced as severely as it has been by the most accurate and dispassionate of the historians of the England of the seventeenth century. But a claim which has attached to it a considerable history and a vast body of thought and writing, antecedent, contemporary and subsequent, and which engaged the minds of two^[1] of the most erudite authors of that time, by whatsoever motive they were impelled to write, cannot be dismissed as unworthy of serious and even exacting study. The purport of the leading works in the history of

↑ Grotius, 'the wondrous child' and scholar, and Selden, 'the glory of England'. Grotius's Mare Liberum, seu de iure, quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia, Dissertatio was published anonymously in November 1608. It formed the twelfth chapter of his work, De Iure Praedae, which was written in 1604–5. The manuscript of this work, written when the author was only twenty-one years of age, was not discovered till 1864. It was published in 1868. Grotius studied under Scaliger at the University of Leyden, which he entered at the age of eleven. At the age of fifteen he took the degree of Doctor of Laws at Orleans, and at the same age accompanied an embassy to the French Court. He thereupon practised law. As a lawyer he had to argue in favour of the lawfulness of the capture of a Portuguese galleon by the Dutch East India Company. In his written work he contended that the sea cannot be taken into possession through 'occupation' and cannot be made State property: the sea is free to all: in spite of Portuguese interdictions from eastern waters the Dutch have a right to navigation and commerce with the Indies. Cf. De Iure Belli ac Pacis, ii, c. 3.

[1] Grotius, 'the wondrous child' and scholar, and Selden, 'the glory of England'. Grotius's Mare Liberum, seu de iure, quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia, Dissertatio was published anonymously in November 1608. It formed the twelfth chapter of his work, De Iure Praedae, which was written in 1604–5. The manuscript of this work, written when the author was only twenty-one years of age, was not discovered till 1864. It was published in 1868. Grotius studied under Scaliger at the University of Leyden, which he entered at the age of eleven. At the age of fifteen he took the degree of Doctor of Laws at Orleans, and at the same age accompanied an embassy to the French Court. He thereupon practised law. As a lawyer he had to argue in favour of the lawfulness of the capture of a Portuguese galleon by the Dutch East India Company. In his written work he contended that the sea cannot be taken into possession through 'occupation' and cannot be made State property: the sea is free to all: in spite of Portuguese interdictions from eastern waters the Dutch have a right to navigation and commerce with the Indies. Cf. De Iure Belli ac Pacis, ii, c. 3.

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