to the saids commissioners in suche maner as they give not way that strangers be permitted to fishe within the saids bounds vpon anie conditioune.”[420] * * * * * A glance at the accompanying chart, indicating the boundary of the “reserved” waters as claimed by the burghs, will show how large an extent of the neighbouring seas was considered to be necessary for the subsistence of the people. Not only were all the great firths included, and the waters of the Minch and within the Isles, but it will be observed that the fourteen-mile limit around a very great part of the coast was drawn, not from the shore, but from an ideal straight line uniting the headlands. When this report from the burghs was submitted to the Privy Council, they professed to find it “to be of too large an extent”; and they therefore, as they said, “out of their desire to his Majesty’s contentment and for the advancement of the great work,” proceeded to “retrench and restrict the universality of the exceptions” made by the burghs. The true spirit of the Council was, however, shown by the fact that their alternative scheme was practically the same. They rearranged the description of the lines at the Orkneys and Shetlands without diminishing the extent of the enclosed sea, and they carried the boundary down the east instead of the west side of the Hebrides, and so on to Islay. They thus reduced the area of the waters proposed to be reserved by omitting only the strip of fourteen miles to the west of the Hebrides. The Council declared that they had reserved an area of fourteen miles off such coasts as were well peopled, and where the inhabitants lived mostly by fishing, and could not possibly subsist and pay their rents and duties without it. They also stated that if a buss-fishing had been established in Scotland,[421] the fishing would have been reserved for the use and benefit of the country people, “seeing it cannot be qualified that ever any Hollanders or other strangers fished in these waters.” In transmitting the two schemes to the commissioners in London, on 31st April 1631, the Council observed that at first the burghs had “stood very punctually” on the instructions at first issued to the commissioners, saying there was no need to particularise the reserved waters, since they had been included in the Act of Union, but that they had been persuaded to abandon this attitude and condescend to particulars. If this was not a stroke of Scotch humour, it would indicate that the measurement of the fourteen miles mentioned in the Draft Treaty was to be understood as expressed in the report of the burghs.[422] [Illustration: Fig. 9.--_Showing the limits of the “Reserved Waters” claimed by Scotland._]