NO MAN'S LAND.
rilHE recent annexation of Spitsbergen to the British Empire, which passed almost unnoticed amid the stirring events of the war, has settled a very old and curious problem. We have heard much of No Man's Land, between our lines and the enemy's, which our troops had to cross so. often at great risk. The group of large islands far within the Arctic Circle had been for ages a political No Man's Land, to which all the Northern States laid claim more or less vaguely, but in which no one State asserted a jurisdiction. Spitsbergen could not exercise its " right of self-determination," because it had na inhabitants except reindeer and bears. Nor could it be said to pertain naturally to any one of the Northern Powers, from which it was separated by at least three hundred miles of stormy seas. Yet the archipelago offered such attractions to tourists, to whalers, and to miners that it was frequented in the summer months by an increasing number of people of various nationalities. Spitsbergen contains mountains of minerals, in a literal sense, and enterprising men thought it worth while to send ships to load the coal and iron ore which might be had for the digging. When capital began to be invested in such workings, and rights of property were created, the disadvantages of a No Man's Land soon, became apparent. There were no laws to observe, and there were no taxes to pay ; but, on the other hand, there was no security for investment. Who was to say whether the mining company which dug out the coal from a Spitsbergen hill and shipped it to Europe had any legal right to do so, or any grievance against rivals who encroached on its workings and used its machinery ? The British Government, with their accustomed modesty, had proposed an international arrangement before the war. But a Conference held at Copenhagen with that end in view failed because Germany, as usual, made untenable demands and would not compromise. Of all the Northern Powers, Germany had the least interest in Spitsbergen, and wanted most. Acting on her own account, she set up a wireless station in the islands, and would have made great use of it during the war if her cruisers had been able to keep the seas. We do not know whether, in fact, this German station in the Arctic was of any service to the ' U '-boats which from time to time harried our munition ships on their way to Archangel ; but it might have been employed for that purpose. Finally, in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany and the Bolsheviks asserted that they, and they alone, were entitled to settle the fate of No Man's Land, without regard to the other nations interested. Germany wanted a place in the Midnight Sun, and Lenin perhaps desired a new penal settlement for the Socialists who had the bad taste to disagree with him. This impudent claim showed that the question of Spitsbergen could no longer be allowed to remain open. We have decided it by annexing the southern portion of the islands, containing the chief mineral deposits, and the most resolute opponents of annexations will find it hard to raise an objection.
The truth is that, by right of settlement and by virtue of possession in due legal form, Spitsbergen became a British Dependency three centuries ago. The islands were first discovered in 1596 by the Dutch skipper Willem Barents, who named them from their pointed hills, but they were first turned to account in a commercial sense by Henry Hudson in 1607, and they were annexed in 1614, when Baffin and Fotherby solemnly took possession of " King James his New-land." The early history of Spitsbergen, so admirably recounted by Sir Martin Conway in his No Man's Land, resembles that of Newfoundland, which was originally a fishing station common to the hardy adventurers of all nations, then came under our naval jurisdiction, and finally developed into a Colony. For sixty years the parallel held good. '1 he Muscovy Company, one of whose leading members was that John Tradescant whose collections formed the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum, sent fishing fleets annually to the Arctic, and amassed much wealth, despite the rivalry of the Dutch, the Danes, the Basques, the French, and the troublesome " interlopers " from Yarmouth and Hull who would not recognize the London monopoly. The Greenland Company, so called because Spitsbergen was thought to be a part of Greenland, continued the work through the Common- wealth period and after the Restoration. Whales in those days were innocent enough to come in shoals into the Spits- bergen bays where the fishermen awaited them. When the whales were killed, by arts which the Basques taught to Northern Europe, the blubber was taken ashore and boiled down in great coppers, and the oil was put into barrels for export. Permanent buildings were erected on the inhospitable shores, including workshops, storehouses, and dwellings for the men. The English whalers, fearful of making the whales shy, dispersed their settlements round the southern coast. The Dutch, on the other hand, concentrated their business at an island off the north-western corner of Spitsbergen, where a little city, called Smeerenburg or" Blubber Town," came into existence after 1617. In its palmy days, about 1630, Smeeren- burg was a hive of industry, in which each of the chief Dutch ports had its own ships, its " cookery," and its warehouse and coopery, while there was a church and there was also a fort to defend the settlement. Fired by the example of some Englishmen who unwillingly spent the winter of 1630-31 in Spitsbergen—after some criminals had vainly been offered a reprieve from hanging if they would do so—the Dutch tried the experiment with success three years later ; but they repeated it once too often, as the unlucky men left to hold the fort were found dead of scurvy. Smeerenburg was too successful to last. The whales after a time declined to come and be killed in such a busy port. The Dutch then took to hunting them in the open sea, without bringing the carcases to shore, and gradually deserted the station. The more pru- dent English whalers in the south of Spitsbergen found, for a time, that the whales still came into their quiet bays, but after the Restoration the operations of the Dutch fleets in the neighbouring seas gradually drove all the whales away. From about 1670 the English whalers ceased to frequent their old haunts, and Spitsbergen, unlike Newfoundland, relapsed into obscurity. A hundred years later, the Admiralty, opening a new era in Arctic exploration, sent Captain Phipps to Spitsbergen on the voyage in which the boy Nelson had his famous encounter with a Polar bear.
It is strange to think of war in connexion with these Arctic islands. But the rival whalers were, from the first, only too ready to fight, and the Muscovy Company's men sometimes found their own countrymen from Hull and Yarmouth as formidable opponents as the Dutch. Our early fleets were well guarded by warships, which drove the Dutch off; but when the Stuart Navy became derelict the Dutch repaid the compliment with interest. In 1618, for example, a Dutch squadron attacked our whalers and inflicted great damage ; fox which, as for the massacre at Amboyna, no reparation was made. Dutch jurists, like the modern Germans, talked much about " the freedom of the seas," but interpreted the phrase in their own interests. These outrages ceased in Cromwell's day, and at a later date the Dutch found themselves harried by powerful French squadrons, which went to the Arctic for the purpose of destroying the Dutch whaling industry. But Europe's need for whale-oil in the seventeenth century was so insistent that the hardy seamen were prepared to fight for it as well as to brave all the dangers of the seas. Sir Martin Conway points out that the modern world, having passed through the Reformation, was crying out for more soap—another illustration of the maxim that cleanliness comes next to godliness—and train-oil was the material which the soap- makers required. He hazards the curious suggestion that it was the greatly increased supply of good soap, from Spitsbergen whales, that led to the popularity of lace and linen and great starched ruffs in the costumes of the Stuart period. But for the discovery of Spitsbergen, our ancestors and ancestresses could not have indulged in such a luxury of fine washable materials as we see in the portraits of Hals and Van Dyck. We now look to the tropics rather than to the Poles for soap-making materials; but Spitsbergen, with its vast deposits of coal and iron ore, has again become necessary to the world. That being the case, it is well that its international status should be clearly defined, so that Spitsbergen may not again become a cause of quitrrel, as it was three centuries ago. Our title may be somewhat faded, but on the principle Nullum tempus =writ regi- which we may interpret as " The lapse of time does not invalidate the King's right to anything "—Great Britain's claim to Spitsbergen is certainly superior to that of any other State.
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