722 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SEA 



ing only once or twice in a year. Soon, however, the Firth 

 was invaded by a fleet of trawlers flying the Norwegian flag, 

 although it was known that Norway possessed no steam 

 trawlers, 1 and these vessels fished regularly in the Moray 

 Firth, carrying their fish to Grimsby, where they were landed 

 and sold. It was soon discovered, and admitted, that these 

 trawlers were in reality English, so far as capital, manage- 

 ment, and crew were concerned, but they were registered in 

 Norway in order to evade the British statute, and they soon 

 obtained a practical monopoly of trawling in the Moray Firth. 

 In 1901 there were fourteen or fifteen of them, but by 1905 

 they had increased to twenty-nine or thirty ; while the visits 

 of trawlers of other nationalities had diminished to nine in 

 1903, to six in 1904, and to two in each of the three following 

 years. In 1903 and 1904 thirteen convictions were recorded 

 against foreign trawlers, eight in connection with the Moray 

 Firth and five in connection with the Clyde; in 1905 the 

 number rose to fifteen for the Moray Firth and six for the 

 Clyde. In all these cases the charge was for trawling within 

 the ordinary three-mile limit. In 1905 a case was brought 

 against Martin Olsen, the Norwegian "flag-master" of one 

 of the trawlers registered in Norway, the Catalonia, for 

 trawling within the Dornoch Firth in contravention of the 

 Act of 1889, and byelaw No. 2, made under the Act of 1885. 

 The place where the offence was committed was beyond the 

 distance of three miles from the shore, but it was within three 

 miles of the ten-mile base-line across the Dornoch Firth, and 

 therefore within the exclusive fishery limit as defined in the 

 conventions, and within one of the areas scheduled in the Act 

 of 1889. The Sheriff-Substitute at Dornoch sustained Olsen's 

 plea of no jurisdiction, on the ground that the Catalonia was 

 registered in Norway, and Norway was not one of the Powers 

 signatory to the North Sea Convention. On appeal to the 

 High Court of Justiciary the decision was reversed, the judges 

 holding that the prohibition in the Act of 1889, being quite 

 general in terms, was applicable to foreigners as well as to 



1 See Norget Officidle Statistik ; Norges Fiskerier, 1906, pp. 17, 18. Sixteen 

 steam trawlers were on the list as registered in Norway in that year, but " they 

 did not carry on fishing from Norwegian ports," and were not included in the list 

 of bonafide Norwegian fishing- vessels. 



