The Council forwarded these propositions to London, and the burghs instructed their own commissioner in a like sense, but with an important qualification as to the Hollanders fishing on the coast of Scotland. The king was to be informed of the great oppressions and wrongs suffered by his subjects from the encroachment of the Dutch on the seas and coasts of the kingdom, at Shetland and Orkney, and lately at the Lewes. If these encroachments were allowed to continue, the burghs declared that the rich fishings would be made quite unprofitable, and they appealed to the king “to free the seas of Scotland and the Isles of the busses of the said Northlands (Netherlands),” and of other strangers, from Hamburg and Bremen, resorting to Orkney and Shetland. At the very least, they said, he ought to free the seas of the Dutch busses or fishing-boats “for the space of twenty-eight or fourteen miles, and to discharge them to have any fishing near the coasts of the said mainland or isles.” If the king would do this, the burghs promised to further to the utmost of their power “his Majesty’s most royal work of fishing,” to supply the proportional number of busses that might fall to their part, and to consent that liberty should be granted to Englishmen and Irishmen to fish in all the waters around Scotland, except the Firths of Lothian, Moray, and Clyde, and those reserved for salmon-fishing; but they would only agree to this on the condition stated and not otherwise. They also asked that the buss-fishing should not be allowed at the Lewes, that it should begin on the east coast on 24th June and the fishing at the Isles on 1st September, and that they should receive equal liberty to fish in the seas of England and Ireland for pilchards and white fish.[427]