No. 267.
General Schenck to Mr. Fish.
London, April 19, 1875. (Received May 6.)
Sir: On the 13th instant, and again on the 16th, 1 had full conversations with Lord Derby in relation to the claim of local magistrates and the higher court in Great Britain and her colonies to the exercise of jurisdiction in cases arising between masters and seamen on board vessels of the United States. I began by bringing to his lordship’s notice, as instructed by your No. 697, the case of the “Lathley Rich”; and to enable him to have accurate information of all its circumstances I submitted to him and allowed him to take note of the papers forwarded by the vice-consul at Hong-kong.
I brought forward again also the case of Albert Allen Gardner, of the ship “Anna Camp,” tried in the county court at Liverpool, in May, 1873.
Referring to and repeating your views on this subject of maritime jurisdiction, as set forth in your Nos. 476 and 597, I pressed them earnestly upon Lord Derby’s attention, and enforced them by examples of the very different and more liberal course pursued by the authorities and judges of the United States toward foreign vessels. I cited as examples the cases you furnished me, which had occurred in regard to British vessels at Galveston, Charleston, New Orleans, and New York, and asked him to look at the correspondence of Sir Edward Thornton, to see with what prompt attention his requests for the intervention of our national Government had been met in all such instances. As to the accustomed decisions and practice of our local and higher courts, I suggested that it seemed as if the rules of comity between nations and the principles of international law laid down by Sir Robert Phillimore and other eminent authorities of Great Britain as applicable to such cases, were better recognized and observed in the United States than in the country of those jurists.
[Page 634]Pursuing the discussion of these points, I recurred to the action of Her Majesty’s government, or rather refusal to interfere as I requested them to do, in the recent case of the “G. C. Trufant,” of which I gave you full account in my No. 731; and I also made incidental mention of the case of George B. Austin, the master of the American vessel “Ironsides,” who was so wrongfully prosecuted and imprisoned last winter on a charge of manslaughter, occasioned, as it was claimed, by a collision on the high seas, but who was liberated after much loss and injury to him by the discovery that the pretense of British jurisdiction was wholly untenable. In that last instance, I informed Lord Derby, the aggrieved party had been remitted with his complaint to the State Department at Washington, and the treatment he had received might perhaps come up hereafter in the shape of some demand for reclamation.
His lordship entered with interest into the consideration of the whole subject. He said he was free to confess, that, as I presented the matter, it seemed as if the courts of the United States had dealt more liberally in such cases with British vessels than some of the courts of Great Britain and her colonies appeared to have done toward ours. To use Lord Derby’s own phrase, “the American courts had taken a more elastic view of the law.” He assented heartily to the importance of measures being taken to prevent a recurrence of what was the cause of so much inconvenience to the commerce of our two nations; but was not prepared, at present, to see how this could be effectively and satisfactorily done, except under further authority from Parliament. He stated that legislation was now being prepared which he felt confident would nearly cover all such cases and difficulties as I had brought to his attention, and would clear the way for a comprehensive consular convention.
I have, &c.,