812 APPENDIX TO BRITISH CASE. 



In the case of seas here mentioned other nations have the right to 

 the innocent use of them, but it must rest with the nation claiming 

 them to determine whether the use that is made of them by another 

 nation is innocent. This is all that the United States claim of 

 " dominion " over Behring Sea in respect to the protection and 

 preservation of the fur-seals resorting to those waters and the 

 industry in the pelts and oil so long established on their islands, 

 which have no value for any other industrial purpose. 



No. 243. 1903: Alaska Boundary Arbitration. Extracts from the 

 Argument of the United States. 



DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE OUTER AND INNER COAST LINE. 



An eminent English publicist has said that " certain physical 

 peculiarities of coasts in various parts of the world, where land 

 impinges on the sea in an unusual manner, require to be noticed as 

 effecting the territorial boundarj 7 . Off the coast of Florida, among 

 the Bahamas, along the shores of Cuba, and in the Pacific, are to be 

 found groups of numerous islands and islets rising out of vast banks, 

 which are covered with very shoal water, and either form a line more 

 or less parallel with land or compose systems of their own, in both 

 cases enclosing considerable sheets of water, which are sometimes 

 also shoal and sometimes relatively deep. The entrance to these 

 interior bays or lagoons may be wide in breadth of surface water, but 

 it is narrow in navigable water. To take a specific case, on the south 

 coast of Cuba the Archipielago de los Canaries stretches from sixty 

 to eighty miles from the mainland to La Isla de Pinos, its length from 

 the Jardines bank to Cape Frances is over a hundred miles. * * * 

 In cases of this sort the question whether the interior waters are, or 

 are not, lakes enclosed within the territory, must always depend upon 

 the depth upon the banks, and the width of the entrances. Each must 

 be judged upon its own merits. But in the instance cited, there can 

 be little doubt that the whole Archipielago de los Canaries is a mere 

 salt-water lake, and that the boundary of the land of Cuba runs along 



the exterior edge of the banks.* 

 489 In the famous case of the Anna (56 Rob. Adm. 373) Lord 



Stowell held that the extent of territorial waters must be esti- 

 mated from the outer edge of the land represented in that case by 

 certain low mud islands formed from the alluvial wash and debris 

 of the Mississippi river, more than three miles from the Belize, the 

 extreme point of the main land. " It is argued." said Lord Stowell, 

 " that the line of territory is to be taken only from the Belize, which 

 is a fort raised on made land by the former Spanish possessors. I am 

 of a different opinion. I think that the protection of territory is to 

 be reckoned from these islands, and that they are the natural ap- 



Hall, " International Law," pp. 129, 130. 



