CHAPTER I. 
THE DUTCH GRAND FISHERY; JAMES I; MARE LIBERUM 
AND DOMINIUM MARIS. 
THE history of the Royal Fishery Companies of England 
is the history of a series of attempts made during the seven- 
teenth century by the sovereigns of Britain to unite English 
and Scotch noblemen, gentlemen of private means, mer- 
chants and fishermen in an enterprise which had for its 
ultimate object the ousting of the Dutch from the position 
of pre-eminence in the North Sea which the Hollanders 
enjoyed as the result of centuries of strenuous toil and 
untiring enterprise. Recognising from the first its national 
importance to a maritime people, the Dutch, with dogged 
perseverance, had striven to develop the fishing industry, 
and with such success as made their fisheries at once the 
envy and the inspiration of all those who, in various ways, 
laboured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to 
establish Britain as a sea power. Roused to action by the 
success of the Dutch, numerous public-spirited pamphle- 
teers wrote with the intention of impressing upon the British 
people the fact that the Hollanders were fast becoming a 
great maritime power through the wealth derived from the 
exploitation of those resources of the North Sea fisheries 
which Britain had so long neglected. That British jealousy 
of the Dutch which is such a factor in the foreign policy of 
Britain during the seventeenth century, sprang in no small 
measure from the growing knowledge of the wealth derived 
A 
