Note 616 — Chapter IX · THE JURIDICAL CONTROVERSIES.

Mare Libervm sive de Jvre qvod Batavis competit ad Indicana Commercia Dissertatio. Lugdvni Batauorvm. Ex officinâ Ludovici Elzevirij Anno 1609. The name of Grotius did not appear on the title-page until the second edition in 1618 (Hvgonis Groti Mare Libervm sive ... vltima editio. Lvgdvni Batavorum, anno 1618), the year in which he was arrested; and that he was not generally known to be the author until this time is shown by Welwood referring to Mare Liberum in 1613 as written by “an unknown author,” and by an English State Paper, prepared for the negotiations with the Dutch ambassadors in 1618, which contains excerpts out of a book called Mare Liberum (Brit. Mus. MSS. Lansd., 142, fol. 383). Grotius was then one of the most prominent men in Holland. Another edition was published, also at Leyden, in 1633, together with Paul Merula’s Dissertatio de Maribus and Boxhorn’s Apologia pro Navigationibus Hollandorum adversus Pontem Hevtervm, under the title, Hugo Grotius, De Mare Libero. It was also included in Hagemeier’s De Imperio Maris, variorum Dissertationes, published in 1663. A translation in the vernacular appeared at Haarlem in 1636,—no doubt in consequence of the publication of Selden’s Mare Clausum,—H. Groti, Vrye Zeevaert, ofte Bewys van het Recht dat de Inghesetenen deser gheunieerde Landen toekomt over de Oost ende West-Indische Koophandel. Hugo de Groot was born at Delft in 1583; he was appointed Advocate-General before he was twenty-four years of age, and settled at Rotterdam in 1613, where he became Pensionary of that town; he was sent to England as one of the Dutch envoys in that year. In 1618 he was arrested in connection with the Barnevelt troubles, and in the following year condemned to perpetual imprisonment; but he escaped to Paris, where he lived for eleven years, and then entering the service of the Queen of Sweden, he was employed as her ambassador at the Court of France. He died at Rostock in 1645. Some of his works were translated into almost all European languages, and even into Persian, Greek, and Arabic.