"'Straits,' says Wheaton, 'are passages communicating from one sea to another. If the navigation of the two seas thus connected is free, the navigation of the channel by which they are connected ought also to be free. Even if such strait be bounded, on both sides, by the territory of the same sovereign, and is at the same time so narrow as to be commanded by cannon-shot from both shores, the exclusive territorial jurisdiction of that sovereign is controlled by the right of other nations to communicate with the seas thus connected. Such right may, however, be modified by special compact, adopting those regulations which are indispensably necessary to the security of the State whose interior waters thus form the channel of communication between different seas, the navigation of which is free to other nations. Thus the passage of the strait may remain free to the private merchant vessels of those nations having a right to navigate the seas it connects, whilst it is shut to all foreign armed ships in time of peace.
"'So long as the shores of the Black sea were exclusively possessed by Turkey, that sea might, with propriety, be considered a mare clausum; and there seems no reason to question the right of the Ottoman Porte to exclude other nations from navigating the passage which connects it with the Mediterranean—both shores of this passage being at the same time portions of the Turkish territory; but since the territorial acquisitions made by Russia, and the commercial establishments formed by her on the shores of the Euxine, both that empire and other maritime powers have become entitled to participate in the commerce of the Black sea, and consequently to the free navigation of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. This right was expressly recognised by the seventh article of the treaty of Adrianople, concluded, in 1829, between Russia and the Porte, both as to Russian vessels and those of other European States in amity with Turkey.'—Wheaton's Elements of International Law, page 229.
"The international code, though it affords cases which rest upon the principles involved in this question of the Amazon, yet it affords no case precisely similar and parallel to it.
"In the first place, there is no other river in the world like the Amazon. The treaties of Vienna respecting the great European rivers, and by which the navigation of the Rhine, &c., was declared to be entirely free throughout its whole course, included no case so broad, so comprehensive, so strongly urgent, as is this of the Amazon.
"In the next place, the European rivers simply involved questions purely of commercial convenience; whereas the Amazon not only involves these, but actually includes questions of civilization, of settlement, and of the use of vacant lands, which their proprietors have offered in fee-simple to the laboring men of whatever tongue.
"The valley of the Rhine was already peopled and subdued to cultivation; and, in case the people on its upper waters were barred out through it from the sea, the features of the country were not such as to cut them off from all commercial intercourse with the rest of the world.
"Now, all commercial intercourse between the rest of the world and the Atlantic slopes of those three republics is cut off from the Pacific by the Andes, and there is no other channel to the high seas left except that by way of the Amazon.
"In the case of the great European rivers, the question, as already stated, was chiefly one of commercial convenience and facility of communication; but with the republics of the Amazon it is not only a question of commercial convenience, but a question also of national well-being—of commercial necessity—a question of cultivation and settlement, of immigration, of civilization, and it is even a question of humanity; for, unless the Amazon be opened to those republics, their territories bordering upon it must forever remain a wilderness, and the people who dwell there must ever be stinted in their enjoyment of the blessings of civilization and refined culture.
"If the Mediterranean were shut up—if the nations bordering upon it were denied access, through the straits of Gibraltar, to and from the great common highway of all nations—then, and in that contingency, we should have, in a commercial sense, a case precisely similar to that of the Amazon.
"The Mediterranean powers (that sea being closed) would, we will suppose, do as the three riparian republics of the Amazon have done, viz: proclaim, each for its own ports and waters, the freedom of the seas, and invite all nations to come and trade with them. Would the nation commanding the straits of Gibraltar have the right to do what Brazil has done, less than one month ago, touching this great South American strait, viz: proclaim to the world that no foreign flag should enter there?