in order to enforce the natural law, which mandated freedom of trade and navigation. Granted that the United Provinces had an ambiguous status in international politics, its inhabitants were nonetheless entitled to freedom of trade and navigation, a right innate to all free peoples, which they could enforce themselves in the absence of an independent and effective judge. Since the right to self-defense made private individuals judges and executioners in their own cause, a company of merchants like the VOC must, under certain circumstances, also qualify as a full-fledged actor in international politics. When confronted by Portuguese harassment and intimidation, the VOC had every right to take up arms in order to safeguard its trade with Asian princes and peoples. Civil magistrates could not be expected to call the Portuguese to account on the high seas, or in countries where judicial systems were either weak or nonexistent. Hence it fell to the VOC to enforce freedom of trade and navigation in the East Indies and to punish Portuguese transgressions of the natural law by means of a just war.
Once it was established that Van Heemskerck had engaged in a just war, Grotius could simply cite the law of war to show that he was entitled to reparations for injuries sustained by himself, his employers, and the Dutch Republic. Grotius admitted that the Portuguese had never harmed Van Heemskerck in his own person or made any attempts on his crew, cargo, and fleet. Yet chapter eleven of De Jure Praedae was proof that Portuguese harassment and intimidation of the natives had materially damaged Dutch prospects for trade in Monsoon Asia. Van Heems-kerck himself had not been able to return to the Spice Islands, for example, which were laid waste by the armada of André Furtado de Mendonça in the summer of 1602. If the dismal fate of Ambon and Ternate was not sufficient reason to engage the Estado da India, the execution of seventeen Dutch sailors in the Portuguese port of Macao in November 1602 should certainly qualify as a casus belli. The sailors belonged to the crew of Jacob van Neck, who, like Van Heemskerck, was employed by the United Amsterdam Company. They had committed no crime except to unwittingly enter the harbor of Macao. Their execution was a blatant injustice, which Van Heemskerck could not ignore in his capacity as agent of the Dutch government and servant of the United Amsterdam Company. Predictably, Grotius concluded that his capture of the Santa Catarina had been justified in order to obtain damages on behalf of his employer and the Estates General.
Grotius’s demonstration had been adumbrated in the verdict of the Amsterdam Admiralty Court, which, in turn, had derived part of its argument from Van Heemskerck’s correspondence with the directors of the United Amsterdam Company and the minutes of his council of naval officers (see appendixes I and II below). They show that Van Heemskerck had already interpreted his commission as authorizing the use of force for the purpose of safeguarding Dutch trade in the East Indies and obtaining damages for the United Amsterdam Company. The Amsterdam Admiralty Court had not just endorsed Van Heems-kerck’s reading of his commission, but also cited the edict of the Estates General of April 2, 1599, commanding its subjects to attack Iberian shipping indiscriminately, and added some inchoate references to natural law and the law of nations. Clearly, the distinct elements of Grotius’s argument in De Jure Praedae were already present in the mode of reasoning adopted by Van Heemskerck, the VOC directors, and the Amsterdam Admiralty Court. Yet it was Grotius who turned this hotchpotch of legal grounds into a seamless whole by means of a radical redefinition of natural law and natural rights.
In his letter to George Lingelsheim of November 1606, Grotius did not just announce the completion of De Jure Praedae, but also wondered whether it should appear in print “as it was written, or only those parts which pertain to the universal law of war.”5 With the exception of its twelfth chapter, De Jure Praedae did indeed remain in manuscript until the nineteenth century. Grotius must have realized that it was not opportune to publish a defense of Dutch privateering in the East Indies on the eve of peace and truce negotiations between the United Provinces and Philip III of Spain and Portugal. Yet he continued to feel a strong commitment to the VOC. In March 1606, he drafted a petition for the VOC directors, for example, wherein he asked the Estates General to forgo its legal share of all booty taken in the East Indies (20 percent) out of consideration for the great expenses incurred by the company in fighting the Portuguese. After he had finished De Jure Praedae, he wrote several draft letters for the VOC directors, addressed to various Asian rulers, all allies of the VOC. Grotius assured them of the company’s continuous military and naval support but requested that they sell spices exclusively to the Dutch as a quid pro quo.6 When the Dutch East Indies trade became a topic of discussion at the Ibero-Dutch peace conference in The Hague in February 1608, Grotius provided the VOC directors with a road map for the negotiations and correctly predicted that the privateering war would continue in the East Indies, regardless of whether a treaty should be concluded in Europe. At the request of the Zeeland VOC directors, he published the twelfth chapter of De Jure Praedae as Mare Liberum (The Free Sea) in March 1609. Although the pamphlet appeared too late to influence the negotiations for the Twelve Years’ Truce—the treaty was signed on April 9, 1609—it had clearly been conceived by the VOC directors as a means to thwart Iberian demands for a Dutch withdrawal from the East Indies and “persuade both our government and neighboring princes to staunchly defend our, as well as the nation’s, rights.”7 The publication of Mare Liberum hardly marked the end of Grotius’s involvement in the company’s affairs. He served as the VOC’s chief negotiator at the Anglo-Dutch colonial conferences in London in 1613 and The Hague in 1615, for example, which induced Richard Hakluyt the Younger to produce the first English translation of Mare Liberum.8 When living in exile in Paris in 1628, he could justifiably claim in a letter to his brother-in-law, Nicolaas van Reigersberch, that “he merited thus much of this company that, even if all others sleep, they ought to keep watch over me.”9
Upon Hugo Grotius’s death in 1645, the manuscript of De Jure Praedae remained in the possession of his descendants, the Cornet de Groot family, for over two centuries. In fact, legal scholars did not know of its existence until the Dutch bookseller and printer Martinus Nijhoff auctioned off Grotius’s personal papers in 1864. The manuscript was purchased by Leiden University Library. One of its humanities graduates, H. G. Hamaker (1819–92), published the first Latin edition of De Jure Praedae in 1868. His text was the basis for the English translation that Gwladys L. Williams prepared for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the middle of the twentieth century.
The Liberty Fund edition of De Jure Praedae reproduces her translation, which first appeared as part of the Classics of International Law series. In addition to Williams’s translation, we reissue appendix A of the Carnegie edition, along with the superb author and subject indexes by Walter H. Zeydel. With two exceptions we have left unchanged the editorial conventions that govern Williams’s translation of De Jure Praedae. These editorial conventions are explained in full in the Translator’s Note to the Carnegie edition1 but may be summarized as follows.
The words and phrases that Grotius wrote in capital letters for purposes of emphasis are printed in italic type in the body of the text. Bold type is used for words that are similarly emphasized in Grotius’s marginal headings and subheadings. Williams used brackets when she felt she had amplified Grotius’s thought in translating his concise Latin phrases.
The manuscript’s folio numbers appear at the end of the relevant text line, which is a change from the Carnegie edition, where they appear in the margin. The position of the folio numbers in the text approximates that of the folios in the manuscript. They should not be considered the equivalent of modern page breaks, however. Williams was frequently obliged to reverse the Latin word order of the manuscript in order to produce a flowing English translation. A comparison with the collotype reproduction of the manuscript reveals that, in a few instances, she either forgot to include the manuscript’s folio divisions or made a mistake in doing so.2 Although Williams did make some mistakes, the sometimes erratic numbering also reflects the fact that
