2180 NORTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



sixty miles of the American coast, and in assuring 1 me that it had 

 been the intention of this Government, and the instructions given by 

 your Lordship, not even to deprive the American fishermen of :>ny 

 of their accustomed liberties during the piv.-ent year, your Lordship 

 did also express it as the intention of the British Government to ex- 

 clude the fish ing- vessels of the United States, hereafter, from the 

 liberty of fishing within one marine league of the shores of all the 

 British territories in North America, and from that of drying and 

 curing their fish on the unsettled parts of those territories." 



If there was any uncertainty about that, any mistake, any misun- 

 derstanding, there was a challenge to Lord Bathurst to state it. But 

 Lord Bathurst acknowledges the receipt of that letter Dr. Lohman 

 has already called attention to that fact on the 30th October, and 

 the* acknowledgment and answer appear at p. 273 of the American 

 Appendix, near the foot of the page. I will read the first paragraph 

 of Lord Bathurst's letter :- 



" The undersigned, one of His Majesty's principal Secretaries of 

 State, had the honor of receiving the letter of the minister of the 

 United States, dated the 25th ultimo, containing the grounds upon 

 which the United States conceive themselves, at the present time, en- 

 titled to prosecute their fisheries within the limits of the British 

 sovereignty, and to use British territories for purposes connected with 

 the fisheries." 



And then he proceeds to attempt to confute the arguments of Mr. 

 Adams in respect of the proposal of Lord Bathurst which Mr. Adams 

 had quoted to him in the letter that he is acknowledging. I do not 

 see how you can have any statement of the position of a Government 

 more clear and distinct than we have it here ; and I need not cite to 

 the Tribunal the record to show that these papers were in the hands. 

 of the negotiators of 1818 on both sides. Both the instructions sent 

 by the State Department of the United States to Mr. Gallatin and 

 Mr. Rush referred them to these papers, and the instructions sent to 

 Messrs. Robinson and Goulburn by the British Foreign Office re- 

 ferred them to these papers. They say : " You have them." And 

 they did have them, and their understanding from them was neces- 

 sarily complete and distinct as to what Great Britain's claim to the 

 extent of her maritime jurisdiction was; that jurisdiction, within 

 which the renunciation clause must be limited, and within which must 

 have been all the coastSjbays, harbours, and inlets, mentioned in that 



renunciation clause. 



1318 That leads us to a conclusion regarding the meaning of the 

 word "bays" in the renunciation clause that agrees perfectly 

 with a variety of circumstances tending in the same direction. In 

 the first place it agrees with what we would naturally suppose was 

 meant by the use of the word in the class of places in which we find 

 the word " bays " ; " coasts " in the distributive sense, bays, creeks. 



