Prince. — Territorial Waters 185 



in the Moray Firth.* Captain Mortensen, in command of 

 her, was found guilty of operating in waters five miles from the 

 shore, on the ground that the Firth had been set aside by the 

 Scottish Fishery Board under the authority of the British Parlia- 

 ment as an area in which trawling was forbidden. The offender, 

 when found guilty, protested that five miles from land was "high 

 seas," but the Appeal Court, in London, dismissed this protest 

 on the ground that the British Parliament had assumed jurisdiction 

 over the waters in question, and it was not for a Law Court to 

 decide whether it had gone beyond its authority, merely because 

 a three-mile limit had been defined in the North Sea Convention in 

 1882, and Norway was a party to it. Doctor Bassett Moore, 

 one of the most eminent and scholarly authorities on International 

 Law, said that this final decision was in accordance with United 

 States' policy, for the Courts follow the decision of those Depart- 

 ments of the Government to which the assertion of its interests 

 is confined, i. e., legislative and executive. 



It is an error, therefore, to claim, as has been very generally 

 claimed, that a three-mile limit is universally recognized and 

 admitted. A slight examination of the facts shows that it is by 

 no means universally recognized. Uruguay, ten or twelve years 

 ago, claimed jurisdiction five miles from shore, and only receded 

 from her position when Great Britain strongly protested; but 

 she still exercises domination over one-half of the river La Plata. 

 The other half belongs to the Argentine Republic. The river is 

 135 miles wide at the mouth of the estuary, and as much as 50 

 miles wide over 100 miles from the open sea. 



In 1876 the Chief Justice of England decided that a German 

 captain had been illegally convicted of having caused the death 

 of a number of British subjects in a collision with his steamer, 

 the "Franconia, " inside the three-mile limit. He stated that the 

 conviction was based on International Law, not on a British 

 Parliamentary Statute. It is very remarkable that no three-mile 

 limit had been authorized by statute in Britain until forty years 

 ago (1878) and in that year Parliament in London passed an Act 



* The Moray Firth, 148 square miles in area, had been closed by the 

 Scottish Fishery Board, but foreign trawlers persisted in fishing there, 

 maintaining that the prohibition did not affect them, as a large portion of 

 the Firth is outside territorial limits. 



