NORTH POLE CONTROVERSY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9704, 29 January 1910, Page 4

NORTH POLE CONTROVERSY.

After Commander Peary's florid dedication of the North Pole to the peaceful use and possession of hid country, it is not a little interesting: to learn, upon the authority of Professor James Scott, that its bestowal in this fashion cannot be sustained in international law. The "old Pole," as Peary so gaily described it, apparently was not his to give away. Professor Scott reminds those interested that "title by discovery applies to land, not to water," and, consequently, the nailing of the Stars and Stripes to the long sought point of the earth's surface in no v»ay gives the United States legal title to the new-found "territory." Even the rights of the mythical Scotsman could not have been maintained bad his position been challenged. The lay mind readily grasps the situation. It cannot be established that discovery of an open sea conveys ownership of the water, or, indeed, of the lands washed by it, as it is universally held that the open seas beyond the limit of territorial waters are insusceptible of appropriation. Professor ( Scott points out that it would not be asserted that the discovery of an iceberg or a floating field of ice conveyed title to the land upon which the iceberg chanced to rest or in whose neighbourhood it floated to the sea. "Therefore, we may eliminate from consideration polar discoveries disconnected with land, unless we are prepared to insist that a different law obtains in the Arctic regions, and that icebergs and ice-floes may not only be acquired, but pass title to adjoining land." Mere discovery alone, even of land, does not by itself vest title. "At most it creates a presumption, an inchoate right, which, followed by occupation, ripens into title." The original priority (as in the case of a mining claim) would be regarded by international law as renounced if the discoverers failed to occupy "within what may be considered, in view of all the circumstances, a reasonable thing." Further than all of this, the rights established in discovery must be fortified with the virtues of a political or sovereign act. That is to say, discov eries due to private initiative do not of themselves 'convey rights. 'These considerations, However, do not come, into account when determinng the question of whose property the "old Pole" may be. An open sea extends around and about it. Ax best it is probably rooted only in the patch of ice, which may be there to-day and gone to-morrow. And so Commander Peary's gift to the nation is not only a perplexingly intangible quantity, but it was clearly never his to convey. "