INTRODUCTION 1 9 



England; and in another work he speaks of the narrow sea 

 lying between us and France and the Netherlands. 



After the union of the Crowns the " British Seas " were 

 very often referred to, and there was equal want of defini- 

 tion of their limits as in the case of the Sea of England. 

 The advocates of the English claims to the sovereignty of 

 the sea assigned them a wide but vague extent, while the 

 Dutch argued that the British Sea was the Channel, the 

 Mare Britannicum of Ptolemy and others, the North Sea 

 being distinct and known as Oceanus Germanicus. In many 

 of the diplomatic negotiations that took place on the subject 

 there were heated discussions as to the meaning of the term 

 the " British Seas," and in point of fact the British repre- 

 sentatives, like the Admiralty itself, were unable to define 

 them. The only serious attempt which was made to define 

 the Sea of England or the British Seas in relation to the 

 claim to its sovereignty was made by Selden in 1635. It 

 did not fail on the side of modesty, for according to him the 

 Sea of England was "that which flows between England and 

 the opposite shores and ports." 1 More particularly in the 

 opening chapter of his second book he describes the British 

 Sea (Oceanus Britannicus) as being divided into four parts 

 according to the four quarters of the world. On the west 

 lay the Vergivian Sea, also called the Deucaledonian Sea 

 where it washes the coasts of Scotland, and in which Ireland 

 is placed ; on the east is the German Ocean, so called by 

 Ptolemy because it lies opposite the German shore; on the 

 south, between England and France, is the sea especially 

 noted by Ptolemy as the British Sea, the Mare Britannicum ; 

 but in reality all the sea extending along the shores of France 

 through the Bay of Aquitaine (Bay of Biscay) as far as the 

 northern coast of Spain was British. Since the northern and 

 western ocean stretches to a great distance, to America, Ice- 

 land, and Greenland, and to parts unknown, it could not 

 "all be called British," but inasmuch as the King of Great 

 Britain had very large rights in those seas, beyond the ex- 

 tent of the British name, it was not wholly to be left out 

 of account. The indefiniteness of these boundaries to the 

 north and west is obvious, but in a chart which he furnished, 



1 Mare Claurum, ii. c. xiii. 



