Closing the Sea - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 33

that lies upon the top of a pair of stairs; it is hard to remove it, but if once it be
thrustoffthefirststair,itneverstaystillitcomestothebottom'.Notgoodforthose
who happened to be standing in its way.
The 1635 edition of The Closed Sea is a remarkable work. It consists of two
parts, each of which explicates what Selden calls in his preface his two proposi-
tions: 'the one, that the Sea, by the Law of Nature or Nations is not common to all
men, but capable of private Dominion or propertie as well as Land; the other, that
the King of Great Britain is Lord of the Sea flowing about it, as an inseparable and
perpetualAppendantoftheBritishEmpire'.Insistingthathewillarguefornothing
more but nothing less, he then devotes five hundred pages to compiling a detailed
defence of Britain's jurisdiction over its surrounding seas in theory and in prac-
tice. The topic is not entirely objective history. As Gerald Toomer, the pre-eminent
authority on Selden, has put it a little acidly, The Closed Sea 'is a lawyer's brief
ratherthanahistoricaltreatise,despiteitstrulyimpressiveexhibitionofknowledge
of both original sources and modern literature. One might wish that Selden had
treated the history of the claims to control the seas surrounding Britain as he had
treatedthehistoryoftithes.'ToomerfindssomeofSelden'sarguments'sopatently
weak or absurd that it is difficult to believe that he himself gave them credit'. He
crowns his judgement by quoting from de Groot: 'jurists who use their proficiency
in the law to please those in power usually are deceived or themselves deceive.'
And yet de Groot praised Selden as 'that humane and learned man' who 'treated
me both humanely and learnedly', while Selden championed de Groot as 'a man
of great learning, and extraordinarie knowledg in things both Divine and Humane;
whose name is very frequent in the mouths of men every where'. This doesn't
sound like the language of mortal enemies. And in fact, they weren't. Both men
regarded liberty as the natural condition of humankind, and both maintained that it
could be constrained only by agreement and never by unilateral imposition; which
means that both opposed state tyranny and understood that law was the means to
do it.
The Free Sea may be just as burdened by its polemics as is The Closed Sea .
Both were lawyer's briefs written for their clients, after all: one for the VOC, the
other forCharles I.Their difference had mostly to dowith the interests they served
rather than with the law each sought to uphold: a difference of degree more than of
substance. Their audience preferred to polarise their positions, English and Dutch
each claiming that their side won this battle of the topic, but in fact neither pre-
vailed completely to the exclusion of the other. This is why the international law