580 THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SEA 



recent American practice. Both were previously unknown to 

 English law. 1 



Moreover, although, as we shall see, the writers on inter- 

 national law had in only a few instances accepted the three- 

 mile limit as an alternative to the range of guns from the 

 shore, and scarcely any of the Continental publicists of repute, 

 the actual practice of Great Britain and the United States, 

 together with the legal decisions in the British and American 

 courts, and the dicta of the judges, tended steadily to bring 

 about its adoption. At first the boundary of one marine league 

 as equivalent to the range of cannon had reference solely to 

 questions of neutrality, as the capture of prizes, in the mari- 

 time wars that prevailed. But very soon it was applied to 



1 Vide Chief Justice Cockburn, Law Reports, Excheq. Div,, ii. 178. It is a 

 curious circumstance that many English writers on municipal law, even after this 

 time, adhering to a different line of inquiry, clung tenaciously to the husk of the 

 old claims of England to the sovereignty of the sea. Hale, as we have seen, 

 followed Selden, as did Hargrave and Blackstone, though with apparent diffidence. 

 Chitty, in his Treatise on the Law of the Prerogative of the Crown, published in 

 1820, relying on Selden, Hale, and Molloy, declares that "the king possesses the 

 sovereign dominion in all the narrow seas, that is, the seas which adjoin the coasts 

 of England, and other seas within his dominions " (p. 173) ; and that he " has an 

 undoubted sovereignty and jurisdiction, which he has immemorially exercised, 

 through the medium of the admiralty courts, over the British seas, that is, the 

 seas which encompass the four sides of the British islands ; . . . the law of 

 nations and the constitution of the country have clothed the sovereign with this 

 power, that he may defend his people and protect their commercial interests " 

 (p. 142). He also assigns the soil under the sea to the king. Hall, in his Essay 

 on the Rights of the Crown and the Privileges of the Subject in the Sea Shores of the 

 Realm, published in 1830, states the doctrine even more nakedly. After defining 

 the British seas according to Selden, he says, " Over the British Seas, the King of 

 England claims an absolute dominion and ownership, as Lord Paramount, against 

 all the world. Whatever opinions foreign nations may entertain in regard to the 

 validity of such claim, yet the subjects of the King of England do, by the common 

 law of the realm, acknowledge and declare it to be his ancient and indisputable 

 right." Hall also assigns the bottom or fundum of the British seas to the king, the 

 authorities cited being Coke, Callis, Molloy, Hale, and Blackstone. Lovelaud, the 

 editor of the second edition of Hall's Essay, which was published in 1875, does 

 not attempt to qualify the statements. It was not, indeed, till after the decision 

 in the case of the Franconia in 1876, and the Territorial Waters Jurisdiction Act 

 of 1878, that the doctrine was abandoned in theory by English lawyers. Even 

 Moore, the editor of the third edition of Hall's Essay, which appeared in 1888, while 

 pointing out the alteration of the law by the decision in the Pranconia case, and 

 by the Territorial Waters Jurisdiction Act, thought it undesirable to vary Hall's 

 text, having regard to the diversity of the opinions expressed by the judges in the 

 case referred to. Vide p 590. 



