312 THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SEA 



The doings of Northumberland's fleet at the Yarmouth fishing 

 caused increased excitement in Holland. Van Beveren know- 

 ing, as he said, that the English ships had not gone jnorthwards 

 " to catch flies," immediately sent intelligence of its departure 

 to Admiral Van Dorp, so that he might extend his protection to 

 the Dutch fishermen. Early in August the Admiral had been 

 expressly instructed to guard the fishermen " from the Spanish 

 and all others inclined to molest them " ; and he had a fleet of 

 fifty-seven sail under his command for this purpose. 1 But Van 



most likely instruments for his nephew's restauration to the Palatinate." John 

 Smith, writing in 1670 (England's Improvement Revived, 257), said that " the 

 composition of the Hollanders (for liberty to fish) was an annual rent of 100,000, 

 and 100,000 in hand ; and never having been paid or brought into the Exchequer, 

 as I could hear of, there is an arrearages of above 2,500,000 ; an acceptable 

 sum," he adds, "and which would come very happily for the present occasions 

 of his Majesty " Charles II. would have been very glad of much less ; he quite 

 failed to induce the Dutch to pay him 12,000 a-year for a like liberty. Evelyn 

 in 1674 (Navigation and Commerce) put the "arrears" at over half a million 

 sterling, and he said that in 1636 the Hollanders paid 1500, 15s. 2d. for licenses ; 

 but this was only, as he explained later, "the sophism of a mercenary pen," since 

 he slumped the convoy and the " acknowledgment " money together (having had 

 access to Northumberland's Journal), and eight years later he wrote to Pepys his 

 remarkable letter of recantation, in which he stated, " Nor did I find that any 

 rent (whereoff in my 108 page I calculate the arrears) for permission to fish was 

 ever fixed by both parties " (Diary and Correspondence, iii.) 



The writers on international law have copied the erroneous statements from the 

 historians and from one another. Wharton (Hist, of the Law of Nations, 154) 

 says, "The exclusive rights to the fisheries within these seas (the Four Seas) and 

 near the coasts of the British Islands had been occasionally acknowledged by the 

 Dutch in the form of annual payments and taking out licenses to fish ; and was 

 again suspended by treaties between the sovereigns of England and the Princes 

 of the House of Burgundy." This statement, which outrages chronology as well 

 as fact, is repeated (without acknowledgment) by Phillimore (Commentaries upon 

 International Law, I., Part ii., c. vi. s. clxxxiv.), and by Travers Twiss (The Law of 

 Nations in Time of Peace, 254), Hall (Treatise on International Law, 145), and 

 others. Hall quotes Hume's statement that the Dutch had to pay 30,000 for 

 leave to remain, and a more recent author supposes that the great fishing of the 

 Dutch on our coasts originated in the reign of Elizabeth, and that, growing strong, 

 they refused to pay the " duties levied without question for generations within 

 the British Seas" (Walker, A History of the Law of Nations, i. 167). As has been 

 shown in the text, the Dutch herring-boats resisted the payment of the " acknow- 

 ledgment " money as far as they could ; the States-General equipped a fleet to 

 prevent by force their molestation by the English men-of-war, and they dismissed 

 their Admiral because he failed in 1636 to protect them. 



1 Aitzema, op. cit., ii. 408. " Op de bewaringhe ende bescherminghe van de 

 groote ende kleyne Visscherij deser Landen tegen de Spaansche ende alien anderen 



die hun souden willen beschadigen," August , 1636. 





