"The Free Sea was originally published in order to buttress Dutch claims of access to the lucrative markets of the East Indies. It had been composed as the twelfth chapter of a larger work, De Jure Praedae (On the Law of Prize and Booty), which Grotius had written to defend the Dutch East India Company's capture in 1603 of a rich Portuguese merchant ship in the Straits of Singapore. The wider applicability of Grotius's arguments regarding the individual and collective rights to appropriate natural resources and to trade freely would ensure that his work transcended its immediate legal and diplomatic contexts." "In the Introduction, Professor David Armitage notes that "few works of such brevity can have caused arguments of such global extent and striking longevity...as The Free Sea... It had implications no less for coastal waters than it did for the high seas, for the West Indies as much as for the East Indies, and for intra-European disputes as well as for relations between the European powers and the extra-European peoples."" Liberty Fund publishes for the first time the only translation of Grotius's masterpiece undertaken in his own lifetime - a work left in manuscript by the English historian and promoter of overseas exploration Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616). Also included are William Welwod's critique of Grotius (printed for the first time since the seventeenth century) and Grotius's reply to Welwod. Taken together, these documents provide an indispensable introduction to modern ideas of sovereignty and property as they emerged from the early-modern tradition of natural law.