The Seventeenth-Century Origins of Modern Salvage Law

Reginald Marsden argued that Sir Henry Marten, while judge of the High Court of Admiralty, had in 1633 entertained the first action for civil salvage ‘in the modern sense’. But Marsden could find little evidence among the formal Admiralty decrees of the seventeenth century that sea-coasters or mariners had regularly used this new plea in the central court to seek rewards for saving ships and cargoes. A sampling of the court's Act Books, however, reveals that Admiralty judges may well have ruled in more than 200 salvage cases from the time of Sir Henry's innovation until the end of the century. In some of these cases, moreover, Sir Richard Lloyd, a late-Stuart judge, abandoned the ancient custom of rewarding salvors with half of what was saved and developed instead the modern and equitable practice of adjusting awards according to what salvors had done and risked in rescuing the property of others.