Closing the Sea - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 34

of the sea today consists of a mixture of the two that recognises both freedom of
movement and reasonable jurisdiction. Together the two men co-created maritime
law. The next generation understood this explicitly and read both authors. *
Had the Selden map ended up in de Groot's possession, no one would need to
guess why. The Singapore Strait, where the original incident over which the VOC
hired de Groot took place, sits in the foreground of the map. Had he possessed the
Selden map rather than the two European maps the Company lent him, he could
have mustered it to support the two foundations of his argument against the Por-
tugueseattempttoexcludetheDutchfromAsianwaters.Firstofall,theregionwas
not terra nullius , or unoccupied territory. 'The East Indian nations in question are
not the chattels of the Portuguese,' he writes, 'but are free men and sui juris ' - that
is, under their own laws. Portugal had no claim as a sovereign power in the region.
Secondly, de Groot could use the map to underscore his point that 'the Arabians
and the Chinese are at the present day still carrying on with the people of the East
Indiesatradewhichhadbeenuninterruptedforseveralcenturies'.ByenteringAsi-
an waters, the Portuguese were simply trading alongside the Asians already there.
Both circumstances ruled against the Portuguese position that they could exclude
the Dutch.
Could Selden have used the map to prove the opposite view, that Portugal had
dominion over these waters? The question is hardly worth asking, since this is not
what The Closed Sea is about. It argues instead, at a far more general level, that
theoceaniscapableofbeingplacedunderstatedominionundercertainconditions.
Thatdominiondidnotruleoutinnocentpassage,butitdiddenythecontentionthat
the ocean was a free space. Arguably, Selden could have used the map to illustrate
this point by showing how maritime trade routes concentrated at the nodes of port
cities - to illustrate the point but not argue it, since the map is basically indifferent
to the legal concerns that excited Selden and de Groot. As we shall see, that wasn't
what the Selden cartographer cared about.
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Had Selden written something that tied his map to issues of maritime sovereignty,
we would be in a better position to say why he wanted to own it. But he didn't. So
we may do better to consider a different possibility. Whatever he might have con-
ceivedaboutsealawfromthemap,hisownershipofitsprangfromadifferentmo-
tivation. Telltale evidence of that motivation lies in The Closed Sea . Flick through
its pages and you will notice, especially in the historical section in Book 1, ex-