342 THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SEA 



From the foregoing, it will be seen that Grotius had ready to 

 his hand many of the legal arguments of which he made so 

 much use ; but the strength of his work lay rather in its appeal 

 to the sense of justice and the conscience of the free peoples of 

 Christendom, to whom it was dedicated. The Spanish authors, 

 moreover, were not in a position to assail the validity of the 

 Papal Bulls, upon which the Spanish and Portuguese claims 

 were partly founded, whereas it was against them that the 

 Protestant writer levelled some of his most powerful philippics. 



The Mare Liberum of Grotius was published anonymously 

 at Leyden, Holland, in March 1609. 1 As the title declares, the 

 author's object was to assert the right of the Dutch to trade 

 with the Indies, and to combat the pretensions of the Portu- 

 guese to a monopoly of navigation and commerce in those 

 regions; but the genesis of the book has only been recently 

 made known. At the end of the sixteenth century, when the 

 commerce of the United Provinces was expanding in all direc- 

 tions, the Dutch merchants resolved to share in the lucrative 



1 Mare Libervm sive de Jvre qvod Batavis compctit ad Indicana Commercia Dis- 

 sertatio. Lugdvni Batauorvm. Ex officina Ludovici Elzevirij Anno 1609. The 

 name of Grotius did not appear on the title-page until the second edition in 1618 

 (Hvgonii Groti Mare Libervm sive , . . vltima editio. Lvgdvni Batavorum, anno 

 1618), the year in which he was arrested ; and that he was not generally known 

 to be the author until this time is shown by Welwood referring to Mare Liberum 

 in 1613 as written by "an unknown author," and by an English State Paper, pre- 

 pared for the negotiations with the Dutch ambassadors in 1618, which contains 

 excerpts "out of a book called Mare Liberum (Brit. Mus. MSS. Lansd., 142, 

 fol. 383). Grotius was then one of the most prominent men in Holland. Another 

 edition was published, also at Leyden, in 1633, together with Paul Merula's Dis- 

 scrtatio de Maribus and Boxhorn's Apologia pro Navigationibus Hollandorum ad- 

 versus Pontem Hevtervm, under the title, Hugo Grotius, De Mare Libero. It wa 

 also included in Hagemeier's De Imperio Maria, variorum Dissertationes, publishe 

 in 1663. A translation in the vernacular appeared at Haarlem in 1636, no doubt 

 in consequence of the publication of Selden's Mare Clausum, H. Groti, Vrye 

 Zeevacrt, ofte e^oys van het Recht dat de Inghesetenen deser gheunieerde Landen 

 toekomt over de Oost ende West- Indische Koophandel. Hugo de Groot was born at 

 Delft in 1583 ; he was appointed Advocate-General before he was twenty-four 

 years of age, and settled at Rotterdam in 1613, where he became Pensionary of 

 that town ; he was sent to England as one of the Dutch envoys in that year. In 

 1618 he was arrested in connection with the Barnevelt troubles, and in the follow- 

 ing year condemned to perpetual imprisonment ; but he escaped to Paris, where 

 he lived for eleven years, and then entering the service of the Queen of Sweden, 

 he was employed as her ambassador at the Court of France. He died at Rostock 

 in 1645. Some of his works were translated into almost all European languages, 

 and even into Persian, Greek, and Arabic. 



