Читать книгу The Sovereignty of the Sea - Thomas Wemyss Fulton - Страница 16

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Shortly after the accession of James to the throne of England, the liberal policy of his predecessors as to the freedom of the sea suffered a marked change. In the previous century, under the Tudors, little was heard of the pretension to the sovereignty of the sea, with the exception of the striking of the flag to the royal ships in the narrow seas—a ceremony that was not peculiar to England. Foreigners then, as always before, enjoyed complete liberty of fishing on the coasts of England and Ireland, and no attempts had been made to exact tribute from them on the Scottish coasts. Queen Elizabeth, as has been shown, not only refrained from putting forward claims to the sovereignty of the sea, but on several occasions and in the most positive manner asserted the freedom of the seas for both navigation and fishing against the exclusive policy of Denmark and Spain. At the end of the Tudor period England was the great champion of mare liberum—long before the Dutch Republic had challenged the monopolies of the Portuguese either by the pen of Grotius or the guns of Jakob van Heemskerk.

But under James the old doctrine was revived, and something new was added in a claim to the fisheries along the British coasts. Before he had been a year in England he took measures, with the laudable object of defining the bays, or “King’s Chambers,” within which the hostile actions of belligerents were prohibited. In its essence this act was opposed to extensive claims to maritime sovereignty, because it restricted a most important attribute of such sovereignty to comparatively a narrow space in the adjacent sea, though a space much greater than that now comprised in the so-called territorial waters. In point of fact, throughout his reign no assertion was made to such a maritime sovereignty as was claimed by Charles I.228 The measures referred to were in relation to neutrality in the war which continued between the United Provinces and Spain, James having promptly concluded peace with the latter Power. He issued a number of proclamations referring to privateering and depredations at sea, most of them being conceived in the interests of Spain; and in one of these, for the recall of British mariners in foreign service, dated 1st March 1604, the king forbad hostilities within his ports, havens, roads, creeks, or other places of his dominions, or so near to any of his ports or havens as might be reasonably construed to be within that title, limit, or precinct, as well as the hovering of men-of-war in the neighbourhood of such places; and he caused “plats” of the limits of his ports and jurisdiction to be prepared for the instruction of his officers concerned.229

Long before the time of James the harbours, roadsteads, and at all events some of the bays of a country were recognised as belonging to it, in the sense at least that hostilities of belligerent men-of-war or the capture of prizes were forbidden within them; they were “sanctuaries” under the jurisdiction and protection of the adjoining territory. With regard to the English Chambers, we find that in the treaty which Cardinal Wolsey drew up in 1521, when acting as mediator between the Emperor Charles V. and King Francis I. of France, it was stipulated that during the war between these two sovereigns, the ships, whether armed or unarmed, as well as the mariners, of either side should be secure from attack by the other Power in the harbours, bays, rivers, mouths of rivers, roads or stations for shipping, and especially in the Downs or other maritime place under the jurisdiction of the King of England.230 There is little doubt that this article only embodied in a formal manner what had long been the practice of nations, the Downs being specially mentioned as the most important anchorage in the kingdom.

When James decided to mark out distinctly on a chart the boundaries of his neutral waters on the coast of England, the matter was submitted to the Trinity House, and a jury of thirteen men, specially skilled in maritime affairs, was appointed to prepare tables and charts showing the position and limits of the King’s Chambers and ports and the sailing directions for the same, according to their knowledge of what had been the custom in the past. The charts and schedules were presented to Sir Julius Cæsar, the Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, on 4th March 1604, together with a sworn declaration that they represented the true boundaries.231 The chambers formed were nominally twenty-six in number, the points or headlands selected by the surveyors being as follows, beginning at the northern extremity of the east coast and ending at the Isle of Man—Holy Island, Souter Point, Whitby, Flamborough Head, Spurn Point, Cromer, Winterton Ness, Caster Ness, Lowestoft, East Ness, Orfordness, the North Foreland, the South Foreland, Dungeness, Beachy Head, “Dunenoze” (Isle of Wight), Portland Bill, Start Point, Rame Head, Dodman Point, the Lizard, the Land’s End, Milford, St David’s Head, Bardsey Island, Holyhead, the Isle of Man. The extent of the “chambers” varies in different places; and while this is obviously due on some parts of the coast to the contour, it is due on other parts to a selection of headlands, no doubt according to the custom which had grown up and was recognised among the officers and others concerned. Thus the great bay between Cornwall and Devon would have formed a natural “chamber” by a line, not so long as some of the others, between Start Point, or Prawl Point, and the Lizard, and which would have formed part of the girdle around the coast; whereas three chambers are formed along its shores. On the east coast the “chambers” are as a rule small,232 the largest embracing the mouths of the Humber and the Thames; they are generally large on the south coast, and largest of all on the west coast, where the whole of the Bristol Channel was enclosed by the line from Land’s End to Milford, a distance of nearly 100 nautical miles, the whole area containing about 3400 square nautical miles. This chamber, as well as those to the north of it, must have been of importance on account of the volume of shipping which passed through it.233