Neutrality of the seas, its evolution.
The vast size of the oceans has been the basis of their neutrality. The neutrality of the seas is a recent idea in political history. The principle arose in connection with the oceans, and from them was extended to the smaller basins, which previously tended to be regarded as private political domains. Their limited area, which enabled them to be compassed, enabled them also to be appropriated, controlled and policed. The Greek excluded the Phoenician from the Aegean and made it an Hellenic sea. Carthage and Tarentum tried to draw the dead line for Roman merchantmen at the Lacinian Cape, the doorway into the Ionian Sea, and thereby involved themselves in the famous Punic Wars. The whole Mediterranean became a Roman sea, the mare nostrum. Pompey's fleet was able to police it effectively and to exterminate the pirates in a few months, as Cicero tells us in his oration for the Manilian Law. Venice, by the conquest of the Dalmatian pirates in 991 prepared to make herself dominatrix Adriatici maris, as she was later called. By the thirteenth century she had secured full command of the sea, spoke of it as "the Gulf," in her desire to stamp it as a mare clausum, maintained in it a powerful patrol fleet under a Capitan in Golfo, whose duty it was to police the sea for pirates and to seize all ships laden with contraband goods. She claimed and enforced the right of search of foreign vessels, and compelled them to discharge two-thirds of their cargo at Venice, which thus became the clearing house of the whole Adriatic. She even appealed to the Pope for confirmation of her dominion over the sea.[576] Sweden and Denmark strove for a dominum maris Baltici; but the Hanse Towns of northern Germany secured the maritime supremacy in the basin, kept a toll-gate at its entrance, and levied toll or excluded merchant ships at their pleasure, a right which after the fall of the Hanseatic power was assumed by Denmark and maintained till 1857. "The Narrow Seas" over which England claimed sovereignty from 1299 to 1805, and on which she exacted a salute from every foreign vessel, included the North Sea as far as Stadland Cape in Norway, the English Channel, and the Bay of Biscay down to Cape Finisterre in northern Spain.[577]
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Indian Ocean was a Portuguese sea. Spain was trying to monopolize the Caribbean and even the Pacific Ocean. But the immense areas of these pelagic fields of enterprise, and the rapid intrusion into them of other colonial powers soon rendered obsolete in practice the principle of the mare clausum, and introduced that of the mare liberum. The political theory of the freedom of the seas seems to have needed vigorous support even toward the end of the seventeenth century. At this time we find writers like Salmasius and Hugo Grotius invoking it to combat Portuguese monopoly of the Indian Ocean as a mare clausum. Grotius in a lengthy dissertation upholds the thesis that "Jure gentium quibusvis ad quosvis liberam esse navigationem," and supports it by an elaborate argument and quotations from the ancient poets, philosophers, orators and historians.[578] This principle was not finally acknowledged by England as applicable to "The Narrow Seas" till 1805. Now, by international agreement, political domain extends only to one marine league from shore or within cannon range. The rest of the vast water area remains the unobstructed highway of the world.
NOTES TO CHAPTER IX
S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 135. New York, 1900.
A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, Vol. I, p. 277; Vol. II, 79-81. New York, 1849.
E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 257, 261. London, 1897.
Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, p. 423.