Thus James was again baffled in his endeavour to force the United Provinces to acknowledge his rights in the fishery. But scarcely had the arrangement been completed when he brought forward another proposal. Pending the conclusion of the final treaty, he wished the States to issue a provisional edict forbidding their fishermen from approaching within fourteen miles of the British coasts, to which they had been coming closer and closer in recent years, a proceeding which was the principal cause of the complaints from Scotland.[363] The distance mentioned was that embodied in the Draft Treaty of Union in 1604, and was supposed to be equivalent to a “land-kenning.”[364] Carleton, however, thought the States would not immediately agree to this,--their cumbersome system of government would alone cause great delay,--and he counselled the king “to begin with the fishers themselves,” by publishing a proclamation fixing the distance at which they would be permitted to fish.[365] But the States were disposed to go so far to meet the wishes of the king. They objected, indeed, that fourteen miles was a greater distance than that at which a person could see the coast from the sea, and thus exceeded a “land-kenning” or the range of vision, but they promised to issue orders to their fishermen to keep so far from the land as to be out of sight of people on the shore, and to strongly prohibit them from going nearer.[366] The business of the herring fishery having thus been shelved, the negotiators took up the other matters in dispute. The East Indian question was settled by a treaty,[367] but the differences as to the whale fishery were not so easily adjusted. The English case was founded on the contention that Spitzbergen belonged to King James, on their prior fishing in those seas, and on the depredations committed by the Dutch in 1618 on English vessels. The Dutch claimed a right to the fishery from their discovery of the island, and they proposed three alternatives: (1) that both nations should fish at Spitzbergen with an equal number of ships, the bays to be divided by drawing lots;[368] (2) that fishing should be carried on by both parties everywhere with an equal number of ships of equal size, disputes to be settled by regulations; (3) that the island should be divided by an imaginary line into two equal parts, the Dutch to have one part and the English the other. The English declined all these proposals, and James informed the ambassadors that even if the island had been discovered by their nation the English had the right to the fishery because they were the first to practise it,--an argument which, it may be remarked, if applied to the herring fishery, would have been unfortunate for the king’s claim to it. But while maintaining his abstract right to the sea at Spitzbergen, James gave way on the immediately practical point, consenting that the Dutch should continue their fishery at the island for three years longer.[369]