1626 NORTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



the view of it for which Great Britain now contends, showing con- 

 clusively what their contention was. In other words, when we leave 

 the contract, the strict document of 1818, and go into all the negotia- 

 tions that preceded it and succeeded it, we find there the strongest 

 possible express language directed not always consciously, but still 

 in fact directed to this very point, showing that both parties were 

 acting on the basis that this liberty should not affect the sovereignty 

 of what is called now the servient State. 



The references, as I have said, are very familiar, but they were 

 used mostly on the subject of bays. My learned friend, Sir Robert 

 Finlay, referred to those passages, I think, in another part of the 

 case, and it will be useful that I should just mention them. They 

 are all so familiar to the Tribunal that if I give the references it is 

 only for the sake of note, because I think the words will strike the 

 members of the Tribunal at once as being well known, and that no 

 one will need to look them up again. 



It will be remembered that when the negotiations began in 1815, 

 after the Treaty of Ghent, in order that this subject, unfortunately 

 omitted at the Treaty of Ghent because the parties could not come 

 to an agreement, should be removed from serious friction between 

 these two States, Mr. Adams still kept to his favourite point that 

 this was a continuance of the ancient right. I am very glad he did, 

 because it helps us, as I have said, to construe this contract very 

 carefully, and it led him into the use of language not now convenient 

 for the United States case. In his letter to Lord Bathurst he makes 

 clear his own position (British Case Appendix, p. 67) ; it is his letter 

 of the 25th September, 1815. He says the treaty of 1783 recog- 

 nised : 



"the right of fishing on .... places of common jurisdiction, and 

 .... the liberty of fishing and of drying and curing their fish 

 within the exclusive British jurisdiction on the North American 

 coasts," 



Of course it was not present to his mind at this time at all that 

 there might arise any dispute as to whether or not our jurisdiction 

 was exclusive. He was not thinking about that. But mark the 

 language ho uses. It gets still stronger later on. He is writing in 

 1815. He is writing in regard to the continuance of a right which 

 has come under the treaty of 1783. How does he describe it? Does 

 he describe it as a place within which Great Britain and the United 

 States have concurrent jurisdiction or dual control ? Not at all. If 

 he thought that that is what he had been enjoying under the old 

 treaty, that is how he would have described his right; but he treats 

 the place in which, for nearly thirty years, or over twenty years, he 

 had been enjoying this right, since 1783, in this way. He says: "We 

 have been enjoying it as a right that is 



