The Free Sea

Introduction

introduction Few works of such brevity can have caused arguments of such global extent and striking longevity as Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum (The Free Sea). The book first appeared in Leiden as a pocket-sized quarto volume from the famous publishing house of Elzevier in the spring of 1609. The publication was anonymous, perhaps because (as Grotius later wrote) “it seemed to me to be safe, like a painter skulking behind his easel, to find out the judgment of others and to consider more carefully anything that might be published to the contrary” (Defense, p. 78, below). Grotius was only in his late twenties but already possessed a reputation as one of Europe ’s most precocious and penetrating humanist scholars. Though selftaught as a lawyer, his reputation as an advocate and adviser was growing, along with his political influence. By publishing Mare Liberum, he was displaying the literary, rhetorical, and philosophical talents that had won him his burgeoning fame and respect, and he was also intervening in two political debates of pivotal significance for his own country. The first was the relationship between the United Provinces and the Spanish monarchy, from which the Dutch had broken away in 1581; the second was the Dutch right to commercial penetration in Southeast Asia. Although the arena of dispute was local, the implications of Mare Liberum’s arguments were global. The book was taken by the English and the Scots as an assault on their fishing rights in the North Sea and by the Spanish as an attack on the foundations of their overseas empire. It had implications no less for coastal waters than it did for the high seas, for the West Indies as much as for the East Indies, and for intra-European disputes as well as for relations between the European powers and extra-European peoples. The immediate context for the publication of Mare Liberum was the process of negotiating a truce between the Dutch and the Spanish to end xi introduction xii 1. Martine van Ittersum, “Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies, 1595–1615” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2002), 442–53. 2. For correspondence from November 1608 to [April] 1609 relating to the publication of Mare Liberum, see Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, ed. P. C. Molhuysen, B. L. Meulenbroek, and H. J. M. Nellen, 17 vols. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1928–2001), I, 128–34, 139–41, 144–45. 3. Peter Borschberg, “The Seizure of the Sta. Catarina Revisited: The Portuguese Empire in Asia, VOC Politics and the Origins of the Dutch-Johor Alliance (1602– ca. 1616),” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33 (2002): 31–62. 4. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 80; Borschberg, “The Seizure of the Sta. Catarina Revisited”: 35. the decades of contention that had begun with the Dutch revolt of the late sixteenth century.1 Among the issues on the table during these discussions was the question of Dutch access to the expanding markets of the East Indies , where the Dutch were engaged in cut-throat competition with the Portuguese, the Spanish, and, increasingly, the English for the huge profits to be gained from trade in silks, spices, porcelain, and other luxury goods. This was, of course, no novel dispute in 1609, but the process of drawing up a definitive truce between the Dutch and the Spanish had brought matters to a head, not least for the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Indeed , it was at the insistence of the Zeeland Chamber of the VOC in the autumn of 1608 that Grotius prepared Mare Liberum for publication, just as it had been at the VOC’s behest that he had originally written it as part of a larger work in 1604.2 The original occasion for the composition of the text that would later comprise Mare Liberum had been the major international dispute occasioned by the Dutch seizure of a Portuguese vessel in the Straits of Singapore in February 1603.3 On that occasion, the Dutch captain Jakob van Heemskerck had captured the carrack Sta. Catarina, which was carrying a fabulously wealthy cargo of trade goods. When its contents were sold in Amsterdam, they grossed more than three million guilders, a sum equivalent to just less than the annual revenue of the English government at the time and more than double the capital...