Mare liberum, mare clausum : a debate between and dominium

On February 25, 1603, having just arrived in the Strait of Malacca from the Indian Ocean, the Dutch admiral Heemskerck noticed that a large Portuguese ship was anchored at the mouth of the Singapore River. It was the Santa Catarina, a merchant ship of fifteen hundred tons with about five hundred men and one hundred women on board returning from Japan, with exceptionally rich loot. The admiral captured him. This episode, apparently irrelevant, triggered a real diplomatic incident between the Iberian powers and the United Provinces, questioning the legitimacy of the right to prey and even requesting a debate on the internationalist profiles of the navigation law. Those who reacted first were the Mennonites who, in the name of their religious belief, expressed immediate rejection of an act considered unjust and violent, even though it represented the greatest economic benefit that the East India Company could obtain from a commercial operation. The proposal crossed national borders and started an academic discussion on the rights of navigation and trade, discovering the ideological foundations of the meeting between the different European powers. The pontiff had spoken of the freedom of the seas and the division of the world between the two spheres of influence, Castile and Portugal, but there were still many issues to be resolved. Thus it was that a young lawyer in his early twenties, Hugo de Groot, representing the interests of the V.O.C., defending the interests of the East India Company before the Court of Admiralty, presented his argument, De iure praedae, in what is remembered as the greatest “battle of the books”. Today the same battle between mare liberum and mare clausum seems to have been brought to our attention. All this therefore shows how the practice of territorialization of maritime space provides a doctrinal and historical-legal framework still in search of an author under the philosophical-doctrinal profile and of an unambiguous and established interpretive key under the legal one . Indeed, some four centuries have passed since the capture of a Portuguese carrack by the East India Company, about which more in a moment, triggered a global conflict around the legal status of maritime space.