It is obvious from the foregoing that the opinions expressed by Grotius as to the appropriation of the sea were not always consistent, and were sometimes self-destructive. If the fluidity and physical nature of the sea made it impossible to occupy or appropriate it, the objection applied as much to one part of it as to another, since it is everywhere fluid; and the admissions in his later book stultify many of the statements in the earlier one. It seems to be indisputable that Grotius was to some extent influenced by his environment, and expanded or contracted his argument to meet the conditions at the time--that he was, in short, like all the others, more or less of an advocate. When he published his greater work he was in the service of the Queen of Sweden, who claimed a somewhat extensive maritime sovereignty in the Baltic, and it is not unlikely that this influenced him in making the admissions referred to. The immediate object for which _Mare Liberum_ was published--the recognition of the right of the Dutch to sail to the East Indies and to trade there--was achieved by the treaty of Antwerp in the month following its appearance,[630] and no reply from the Portuguese or Spaniards to the arguments of Grotius was published till sixteen years later. Grotius tells us that a work in refutation of _Mare Liberum_ had been prepared by a scholar of Salamanca, but it was suppressed by Philip III.;[631] but in 1625, when Philip IV. was on the throne, an elaborate defence of the rights of Portugal in the Indies and a reply to Grotius was published by Franciscus Seraphinus de Freiras, a Spaniard, who dedicated his book to the king.[632] The Venetians also, whose power had by this time declined, began to defend with the pen their rights in the Adriatic. These rights had been indirectly assailed by the general argument of _Mare Liberum_, and directly in the writings of de Castro and Vasquius, from which Grotius had quoted liberally; and now at the beginning of the seventeenth century they were actively contested by other Powers, and in particular by Spain. Hence quite a number of works defending the claims of Venice appeared at this period, the best of which was that of Pacius, who relied on the opinions of numerous early jurists, as Bartolus, Baldus, and Angelus; on immemorial possession and prescription, and stated that the rights of the Venetians consisted in jurisdiction, the imposition of taxes, the prohibition or regulation of navigation, the protection of subjects, and the suppression of pirates.[633]