inschoten
(a Hollander who had been in the Portuguese service), had at last
discovered the route to the Indies. As a result the great Dutch East
India Company was founded and a systematic war upon the Portuguese and
Spanish colonies in Asia and Africa was begun in all seriousness.

It was during this early era of colonial conquest that a curious lawsuit
was fought out in the Dutch courts. Early in the seventeenth century a
Dutch Captain by the name of van Heemskerk, a man who had made himself
famous as the head of an expedition which had tried to discover the
North Eastern Passage to the Indies and who had spent a winter on the
frozen shores of the island of Nova Zembla, had captured a Portuguese
ship in the straits of Malacca. You will remember that the Pope had
divided the world into two equal shares, one of which had been given
to the Spaniards and the other to the Portuguese. The Portuguese quite
naturally regarded the water which surrounded their Indian islands as
part of their own property and since, for the moment, they were not at
war with the United Seven Netherlands, they claimed that the captain
of a private Dutch trading company had no right to enter their private
domain and steal their ships. 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 Ja