I will even put the case stronger. If it be admitted
that I had the right to commission a tender, and the fact had been that
I had seized a French ship and put her in commission, you could not
inquire into the fact. You would have no right to know but that I had
the orders of my Government for this seizure. In short, you would have
no right to inquire into the matter at all. My ship being regularly
commissioned, I am responsible to my Government for my acts, and my
Government, in the case supposed, would be responsible to France, and
not to you. If this reasoning be correct--and with all due submission to
his lordship I think it is sustained by the plainest principles of the
international code--it follows that the condemnation of a prize in a
prize court is not the only mode of changing the character of a captured
ship. When the sovereign of the captor puts his own commission on board
such a ship, this is a condemnation in its most solemn form, and is
notice to all the world. On principle, if a ship thus commissioned were
recaptured, the belligerent prize court could not restore her to her
original owner, but must condemn her as a prize ship of war of the enemy
to the captors; for prize courts are international courts, and cannot
go behind the pennant and commission of the cruiser.
Further, as to this question of adjudication, your letter to Lieutenant
Low, the late commander of the Tuscaloosa, assumes that, as the
Tuscaloosa was not condemned, she was therefore the property of the
enemy from whom she had been taken.
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