X PREFACE 



indeed, came to a head a few years earlier, when, 

 in 1602, the King of Denmark sought to prevent 

 the EngHsh from fishing in the high seas, and it 

 was one of the last public acts of Elizabeth to 

 instruct her ambassadors to declare that the 

 law of Nature allowed fishing in the sea any- 

 where, and the using of ports and coasts of 

 princes in amity for traffic and shelter against 

 peril of the sea, unless there was a contract to 

 the contrary. At an earlier date the navigation 

 of the Indian seas had been the subject of 

 bitter dispute between the Dutch and Portu- 

 guese, owing to the grant by the Pope to the 

 Portuguese of an exclusive right of navigation 

 within certain boundaries. The Spanish jurists 

 also denied the Portuguese claim to ownership 

 of the seas, and Grotius only carried a similar 

 line of argument further in denying that any 

 maritime State possessed right of dominion of 

 the waters adjacent to its territory. The 

 student would do well to refer to a masterly 

 essay on the whole subject contributed by Sir 

 John Macdonell, K.C.B., to the Nineteenth 

 Century for November, 1917. 



Until the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury the claims of England, even over the 

 narrow seas, were scarcely insisted upon, and, 

 generally speaking, the policy advocated by 

 Selden in Mare clausiim, his official reply to 

 Grotius' Mare liberum, was kept in abeyance by 

 James I., as the King of England owed a sum 

 of money to his father-in-law, who happened to 



