Disputed Fishing Rights. 
267 
would have ended the fishery dispute at once. He was, 
however, constrained to be content with very nearly our 
present limits. He then declared one essential of peace to 
be freedom of fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland as well as 
elsewhere. This claim was readily agreed to by Oswald, the 
British commissioner, who wrote home in secret dispatches; 
“ I own I wondered that he should think it necessary to ask for 
this privilege, and I doubted whether the exclusion of the New 
.Englanders could be maintained without continuing in a state 
of continual quarrel with them. I suspected that drying fish 
was included in Franklin’s demand though it was not men¬ 
tioned. ” After much debate drying was allowed on all unset¬ 
tled parts of Nova Scotia as well as on most coasts of Labrador 
and Newfoundland. These and other piscatory claims were 
most pressed by John Adams, the New England envoy, who was 
indignant that he was not permitted to proclaim that there 
could be no peace with the refusal of any iota of fishing free¬ 
dom. Nothing in his career pleased him so much as what he 
thus achieved. He had a seal struck with the figure of a fish 
upon it ^nd the Legend Piscemur ut olim ,* to be handed down 
in his family from generation to generation. 
After the peace which closed the war of 1812 it was held 
by Great Britain that all fishing concessions had been annulled 
by that war. This contention was resisted by the United States. 
“Fishing privileges, ” said the younger Adams, “ are not a Brit¬ 
ish grant as Englishmen assert, they are a British acknowl¬ 
edgment. ” He spurned the word “ concession. ” 
At the international convention of 1818 the ancient fishing 
facilities were, in the judgment of Adams, substantially re¬ 
gained. But more than one subsequent treaty has been called 
for. 
Webster was charged — his friends say falsely,— with will¬ 
ingness to cede Oregon to Great Britain in exchange for coveted 
fishing concessions. No one who knew that Webster was noth¬ 
ing if not a fisherman could be persuaded that he would relin¬ 
quish any particle of fishery rights. No man who had handled 
cod lines and nets failed of faith in him when he said, “ I am 
* Hor. Ep. I. 6, 57. 
