© 8) 
limits and hence that no jurisdiction could affect any 
action at that place. 
In the judgment of the court as reported in the 
Madras Law Journal (Vol. XIV, No. 7 Madras, July 
1904), it was declared that— 
(2) Palk’s Bay, where the bed is situated being a 
land-locked arm of the sea, surrounded on all sides by 
territory under the rule of the King-Emperor, cannot be 
regarded as the high sea ; within this Bay, no part of the 
water area can, therefore, be outside the territorial juris- 
diction of the Government of India whose predecessors 
have granted a limited right, that of fishing chanks 
therein within certain limits, to the Raja of Ramnad or 
his assignees. 
(6) Chanks are not fish. They are not /ferae 
naturae, but are domttae naturae and are to be placed in 
the same category as oysters and so may become the 
subject of theft. 
(c) Further, the effective exercise of the right to fish 
and lease these chank beds had been exercised by the 
Raja of Ramnad and his predecessors both while they 
were feudatory chiefs prior to 1803 and since then as 
zamindars under a permanent settlement which included 
the chank fishery revenue as one of the heads of revenue 
upon which the peshkash was calculated. This effective 
occupation, reinforced by explicit Government sanction, 
would of itself confer a prescriptive right to the fishery. 
The judgment further stated that, as the Gulf of 
Mannar is also similarly situated to Palk Bay, chanks 
in the chank beds of that gulf may also be the subject of 
theft. The court held indeed that if the beds from which 
the chanks were taken had been off that part of the coast 
of Ramnad situated in the Gulf of Mannar their decision 
would have been the same, since the evidence of effective 
occupation of the chank beds in both localities (z.e., in 
Palk Bay and the Gulf) is similar. 
At the present time the Ramnad fishery is leased for 
Rs, 4,060, which represents rather more than the average 
of the past 30 years(Rs. 3,047—7—6) as shown by the table 
of annual revenue included in the appendix. 
The Sivaganga chank fishery is of little importance, 
its lease seldom realizing more than Rs. 100 or Rs. 200 
per annum. A tabulation of the annual revenue 
3 
