Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty. Hugo Grotius
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were concerned, the verdict of the Amsterdam Admiralty Court of September 9, 1604, settled the legal aspects of the case quite satisfactorily. The Admiralty Court had confiscated the carrack and assigned it jointly to the VOC directors and Van Heemskerck and his crew. The directors realized, however, that it would take more than a verdict to win widespread support for their cause, both in domestic and international politics. It was imperative to placate Henry IV of France and James I of England, for example, who had recently made peace with the king of Spain and Portugal but who might be induced to back the Dutch diplomatically over their attacks on the Iberian colonial empire. In addition, Grotius should subtly remind the Estates General that it had virtually ordered the directors in November 1603 to go on the offensive against the Estado da India, and that it could not, therefore, disavow the company’s privateering campaign in good conscience. In sum, directors expected him to write a short, inflammatory pamphlet detailing the iniquity of the Portuguese in the East Indies, who deserved condign punishment for the ceaseless harassment and intimidation to which they had subjected Dutch merchants ever since Cornelis de Houtman’s voyage to Java in 1595–97. In order to supply Grotius with the right information, the directors put together a “book treating of the cruel, treasonous and hostile procedures of the Portuguese in the East Indies” and sent him various other materials that served to justify Van Heemskerck’s capture of the Santa Catarina.2
Grotius took the directors’ documentation very seriously indeed and faithfully incorporated it in De Jure Praedae. The volume of “Indian reports” survives in his personal papers at the Dutch National Archives. It consists of twelve sworn statements of Dutch merchants and mariners, along with three diary extracts, which describe, in Grootenhuys’s words, “what the Portuguese have attempted against each of the voyages for the purpose of destroying our men.” At the behest of the Amsterdam VOC directors, these attestations and diary extracts were collected from the former employees of the regional overseas trading companies. There is every reason to believe that Grotius understood the “Indian reports” in the manner intended by Grootenhuys, as “countless proofs of [Portuguese] perfidy, tyranny and hostility.”3 They form the basis of the eleventh chapter of De Jure Praedae, a long narrative of the early Dutch voyages to the East Indies.
Grotius had no intention of producing an objective historical account. Instead, he was eager to comply with the criteria of forensic rhetoric as defined by the orators of ancient Rome. Like Cicero and Quintilian, he considered it sufficient to present some, but not all, of the facts of the case. Yet he carefully refrained from any kind of willful distortion of the evidence at hand. In lawyerlike fashion, he decided to furnish material proof of Portuguese culpability in order to win his case in the court of public opinion. Thus he indicated on the manuscript’s last folio that the integral text of eight documents should be appended in Latin translation:
the edict of the Estates General of April 2, 1599
the verdict of the Admiralty Court of September 9, 1604
the decree of the Estates of Holland of September 1, 1604
the letter of the bishop of Malacca to the king of Spain and Portugal of April 30, 1600
Van Heemskerck’s correspondence with the captain of the Santa Catarina, and with the town councillors and governor of Malacca in March 1604
Grotius considered these documents conclusive evidence of (1) a systematic Portuguese campaign to oust Dutch merchants from the East Indies, (2) the Santa Catarina’s capture in a just war, and (3) its rightful possession by the VOC. English translations are included in appendix I below.
His painstaking reconstruction of the early Dutch voyages to the East Indies notwithstanding, Grotius must soon have realized that he could never satisfactorily relate the “facts” of the case to its underlying legal principles in a pamphlet written on the spur of the moment. He probably finished chapter eleven of De Jure Praedae in the winter of 1604–5 and pointedly ignored Grootenhuys’s request for a quick publication. He opted instead for an in-depth study of the “universal law of war,” revolutionizing natural law and natural rights theories in the process. He admitted as much in his letter to the Heidelberg town councillor George Lingelsheim of November 1, 1606, wherein he announced the completion of his “little treatise on Indian affairs.” He confidently declared that, although “the universal law of war” was a tried and tested subject, he had thrown new light on it by means of “a fixed order of teaching, [viz.] the right proportion of divine and human law mixed together with the dictates of philosophy.”4
Grotius’s decision to investigate “the universal law of war” resulted in a significant expansion of the manuscript—it consists of 163 closely written folios—and a somewhat lopsided organization. The first half of the manuscript contains the introduction, followed by nine chapters of legal principles, the so-called Dogmatica de Jure Praedae. The second half consists of Grotius’s account of the early Dutch voyages to the East Indies in chapter eleven and a Ciceronian-style closing argument that covers chapters twelve through fifteen and presents VOC privateering as just, honorable, and beneficial.
The second chapter of De Jure Praedae, also known as the Prolegomena, contains an elaborate system of nine rules and thirteen laws (reproduced in appendix A), which Grotius deduced from an individual’s right to self-defense and the law of inoffensiveness. The sovereign, free individual was indeed the starting point of his political and legal philosophy. Yet Grotius should not be considered a proponent of democratic government and inalienable individual rights in a twenty-first-century sense of the word. He argued, for example, that human beings could become slaves of their own volition, in which case their total subjection to the will of others constituted a valid contract. In addition, he strenuously denied that the Dutch war of independence (1568–1648) had originated in a popular revolt against Philip II of Spain and Portugal. Instead, he reserved the right of resistance for the traditional governing elite, the Dutch magistrates who were bearers of the “marks of sovereignty.” In Grotius’s view, it was the king’s unconstitutional behavior that had forced the provincial Estates, assembled in the Estates General, to take up arms to defend themselves, acquiring full sovereignty and independence in the process.
Although Grotius does not qualify as a democrat or human rights activist, his justification of Van Heemskerck’s capture of the Santa Catarina was unprecedented in early modern political and legal philosophy. He was the first to introduce the notion of subjective rights—man was born a sovereign and free individual who could execute his own right—and used it to defend the establishment of a Dutch empire of trade in the East and West Indies. He boldly argued in chapter thirteen of De Jure Praedae that Van Heemskerck had acted as the agent of a sovereign and independent Dutch state, which could order indiscriminate attacks on Iberian shipping as part of its public war against Philip III of Spain and Portugal. Few of Grotius’s contemporaries would have agreed with this analysis. When he learned of the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the United Provinces in April 1609, Henry IV of France famously declared that his Dutch allies might be free but were certainly not sovereign and independent. Grotius would have had a hard time convincing the statesmen and lawyers of his age that Van Heemskerck’s capture of the Santa Catarina was a legitimate act of public war. Yet his argument in chapter twelve of De Jure Praedae was more radical still: a trading company might legitimately engage in a private war against other merchants, or even against the agents of a sovereign state, 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