DESPATCHES, REPORTS, CORRESPONDENCE, ETC. 829 



American ; that is, owned and officered by Americans, and, therefore, 

 entitled to exercise the rights assured by the Treaty of 1818 to the 

 inhabitants of the United States. 



It is a cause of gratification to the Government of the United 

 States that the prohibitions interposed by the local officials of New- 

 foundland were promptly withdrawn upon the communication of the 

 facts to His Majesty's Government, and that the Memorandum now 

 under consideration emphatically condemns the view upon which 

 the action of the local officers was based, even to the extent of refus- 

 ing assent to the ordinary forms of expressions which ascribe to ships 

 the rights and liabilities of owners and masters in respect of them. 



It is true that the Memorandum itself uses the same form of expres- 

 sion when asserting that American ships have committed breaches 

 of the Colonial Customs Law, and ascribing to them duties, obli- 

 gations, omissions, and purposes which the Memorandum describes. 



Yet we may agree that ships, strictly speaking, can have no rights 

 or duties, and that whenever the Memorandum, or the letter upon 

 which it comments, speaks of a ship's rights and duties, it but uses 

 a convenient and customary form of describing the owner's or 

 master's right and duties in respect of the ship. As this is conceded 

 to be essentially " a ship fishing," and as neither in 1818 nor since 

 could there be an American ship not owned and officered by Ameri- 

 cans, it is probably quite unimportant which form of expression is 

 used. 



I find in the Memorandum no substantial dissent from the first 

 proposition of my note to Sir Mortimer Durand of the 19th October, 

 1005, that any American vessel is entitled to go into waters of the 

 Treaty coast and take fish of any kind, and that she derives this 

 right from the Treaty and not from any authority proceeding from 

 the Government of Newfoundland. 



Nor do I find any substantial dissent from the fourth, fifth, and 

 sixth propositions, which relate to the method of establishing the 

 nationality of the vessel entering the Treaty waters for the purpose 

 of fishing, unless it be intended, by the comments on those propo- 

 sitions, to assert that the British Government is entitled to claim 

 that, when an American goes with his vessel upon the Treaty coast 

 for the purpose of fishing, or with his vessel enters the bays or har- 

 bours of the coast for the purpose of shelter and of repairing dam- 

 ages therein, or of purchasing wood, or of obtaining water, he is 

 bound to furnish evidence that all the members of his crew are 

 inhabitants of the United States. We cannot for a moment admit 

 the existence of any such limitation upon our Treaty rights. The 

 liberty assured to us by the Treaty plainly includes the right to use 

 all the means customary or appropriate for fishing upon the sea, 

 not only ships and nets and boats, but crews to handle the ships 

 and the nets and the boats. No right to control or limit the means 

 which Americans shall use in fishing can be admitted unless it is 

 provided in the terms of the Treaty, and no right to question the 

 nationality of the crews employed is contained in the terms of the 

 Treaty. In 1818, and ever since, it has been customary for the 

 owners and masters of fishing-vessels to employ crews of various 

 nationalities. During all that period I am not able to discover that 

 any suggestion has ever been made of a right to scrutinize the 



