1502 NORTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



leagues of the coast, beginning at Cape Spencer and running down to 

 54 40', that the line as laid down in the treaty would be 10 marine 

 leagues from the windings or sinuosities of the coast, and they 

 marked out a line which was 10 marine leagues back from the head 

 waters of the Lynn Canal, and of each of those deep indentations 

 which you see on the map. The contention of the United States was 

 substantially sustained by the Tribunal. The line is not, geographic- 

 ally or arithmetically, 10 marine leagues away all the time, for when 

 the Tribunal came practically to lay it down on the map, they took 

 tops of mountains and available geographical points, to sight across 

 from ; but in substance they laid the line at 10 marine leagues from 

 the head waters of the bays, that is to say, from the sinuosities or 

 windings of the coast. That was the contention of the United States 

 before the Alaska Tribunal. Great Britain, on the other hand, said 

 that " coast " was to be understood as the frontier coast, not the 

 physical coast that the United States contended for, but a political 

 coast-line, and so it proposed a line which should be inside of those 

 islands that you see on the map, but should be outside of nearly all 

 of these deep inlets. They suggested that bays 10 miles in width 

 should be the ones which were cut off, and left inland, landward, and 

 the line should run along crossing bays at the point at which they 

 were 10 miles wide, and so Great Britain worked out a coast-line of 

 that kind. 



The United States never agreed that 10 miles was to be the 

 908 width of a bay for a political coast-line much less than 31-mile 

 bays, or any such bays were the ones that were to be left in- 

 land, and the line carried across them. 



Mr. Hannis Taylor, in his argument which appears in volume vii 

 of the minutes of the proceedings of the Alaska Boundary Tribunal 

 on p. 611, says this, in the next to the last paragraph : 



" The authority, Kivier, if authority is needed, is a demonstration 

 that the political coast line is simply a legal creation; it is a fiction 

 of law. 



" It is an imaginary line which the law superimposes upon the 

 physical coast line as a basis. But for the purposes of international 

 law, instead of following all the convolutions and sinuosities of the 

 coast, it is permitted to go across the heads of bays and inlets, and it 

 is in that particular that the rule of international law comes in as to 

 the width of bays and inlets, either 6 or 10 miles. We are not en- 

 cumbered with that question, because the British Case contends that 

 they must be 10 miles, and we do not dispute it, and these outside 

 inlets are 10 miles. So we are not encumbered with that question. 

 It is a legal fiction imposed by the operation of law as an accessory, 

 as Rivier puts it, to the political coast line. The minute you establish 

 it, the minute you fix it, all waters back of it, whether they are waters 

 in the Archipelago there of Alexander or the Archipelago de Los 

 Canaries, of Cuba, they all become, as Hall says, salt-water lakes: 



