And they
brought suit. The directors of the Dutch East India Company
hired a bright young lawyer, by the name of De Groot or
Grotius, to defend their case. He made the astonishing plea
that the ocean is free to all comers. Once outside the distance
which a cannon ball fired from the land can reach, the sea is
or (according to Grotius) ought to be, a free and open highway
to all the ships of all nations. It was the first time that this
startling doctrine had been publicly pronounced in a court
of law. It was opposed by all the other seafaring people. To
counteract the effect of Grotius' famous plea for the ``Mare
Liberum,'' or ``Open Sea,'' John Selden, the Englishman,
wrote his famous treatise upon the ``Mare Clausum'' or ``Closed
Sea'' which treated of the natural right of a sovereign to regard
the seas which surrounded his country as belonging to his territory.
I mention this here because the question had not yet
been decided and during the last war caused all sorts of
difficulties and complications.
To return to the warfare between Spaniard and Hollander
and Englishman, before twenty years were over the most
valuable colonies of the Indies and the Cape of Good Hope and
Ceylon and those along the coast of China and even Japan were
in Protestant hands. In 1621 a West Indian Company was
founded which conquered Brazil and in North America built
a fortress called Nieuw Amsterdam at the mouth of the river
which Henry Hudson had discovered in the year 1609
These new colonies enriched both England and the Dutch
Republic to such an extent that they could hire foreign soldiers
to do their fighting on land while they devoted themselves
to commerce and trade.
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