Welwood was scarcely fitted either by knowledge or capacity to be a formidable antagonist to a giant like Grotius; and although his writings contain quite a number of arguments which were later used and expanded by Selden, it can hardly be said that they had a great influence on the controversy. He looked upon _Mare Liberum_ as an attack on the rights of King James and his subjects to the fisheries “on this side the seas,” veiled under the pretext of asserting the liberty to sail to the Indies. As befitted his nationality and his time, many of his arguments were drawn from Holy Writ, and he had no difficulty in placing Providence on the side of James and in opposition to the Dutch. Others were more pertinent. He urged that the injunctions of the Roman law applied only to the subjects of Rome, and not internationally as between state and state,--an opinion also pressed, as we have seen, by Vasquius; that the fluidity of the sea was no bar to its occupation, and that it could be, and had been in certain cases, divided up into marches and boundaries, by the ordinary methods used by navigators, “so farre as is expedient for the certain reach and bounds of seas, properlie pertaining to any prince or people,”--what these bounds are or should be he does not say, though he quotes the Italian limit of 100 miles with approval. He held that the liberty of navigation was beyond all controversy, and agreed to the principle of the complete freedom of the sea so far as concerned the “main Sea or great Ocean,” which was “farre removed from the just and due bounds above mentioned properlie perteyning to the neerest Lands of euerie Nation.” To Grotius’ statement that it was worse to prohibit promiscuous fishing than to forbid navigation, Welwood justly replied that if the free use of the sea is interfered with for any purpose, it ought to be chiefly for the sake of the fishings, if the fishes become exhausted and scarce, as he says was the condition at that time on the east coast of Scotland, from the “neere and dailie approaching of the busse fishers” scattering and breaking the shoals, so that no fish “worthy of anie paines and travels” could now be found.