chapter 6: The sea or right of navigation is not proper to the Portugals by title of the Pope’s gift - Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea (Hakluyt trans.) [1609]
Edition used:
The Free Sea, trans. Richard Hakluyt, with William Welwod’s Critiuqe and Grotius’s Reply, ed. David Armitage (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004).
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chapter 6
The sea or right of navigation is not proper to
the Portugals by title of the Pope’s gift
The donation of Pope Alexander, which may be alleged in the second place by the Portugals challenging the sea or right of sailing only to themselves, seeing the title of invention faileth, is sufficiently convinced of vanity by that which hath been spoken before. For donation hath no force in things which are without the compass of merchandise, wherefore, seeing the sea or the right of sailing in it can be proper to no man, it follows that it could neither be given by the Pope nor received of the Portugals. Further, seeing it is before declared by the opinion of all men of sound judgment that the Pope is not a temporal lord of the whole world, it is sufficiently understood that he is not lord of the sea. Although that be granted, yet the right annexed to the papacy should in no part be transferred to any king or people, as the emperor could not convert or alien at his pleasure the provinces of the empire to his own uses.
That no man, at the least that hath any shame, will deny, seeing no man will grant the Pope right of disposing in temporal things unless peradventure so much as his necessity of spiritual things requireth, but these things whereof we now treat—to wit, the sea and the right of sailing—respect gain and mere profit, not the affairs of piety; it follows that his power in this was nothing. What, cannot princes indeed, that is temporal lords, by any means hinder any from navigation, seeing if they have any right in the sea it is only the right of protection and jurisdiction? That also is well known among all that the Pope hath no authority to do these things which are contrary to the law of nature. But it is contrary to the law of nature that anyone should have the sea or the use thereof proper to himself, as we have now sufficiently declared. To conclude, therefore: seeing the Pope cannot take any man’s right from him, what defense shall this fact have if with one word he should exclude so many people, undeserving, uncondemned and harmless, from that right which no less appertained unto them than to the Spaniards?
Therefore we must either say that such a pronouncing was of no force or, which is no less credible, that the Pope’s meaning was such that he desired the strife between the Castilians and the Portugals should be mediated but nothing of others’ right diminished.
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