Treaty of 1783
was negotiated, his knowledge of the fisheries and his sense
of their importance were what induced him to take the mission.
He declared that unless our claims were fully recognized,
the States would carry on the war alone. He said:

"Because the people of New England, besides the natural claim
of mankind to the gifts of Providence on their coast, are
specially entitled to the fishery by their charters, which
have never been declared forfeited."

In the debate on the articles of peace in the House of Lords,
Lord Loughborough, the ablest lawyer of his party, said:

"The fishery on the shores retained by Britain is in the
next article not ceded, but recognized as a right inherent in
the Americans, which though no longer British subjects, they
are to continue to enjoy unmolested."

This was denied nowhere in the debate.

John Adams took greater satisfaction in his achievement when
he secured our fisheries in the treaty of 1783 than in any
other of the great acts of his life.* After the treaty of 1783
he had a seal struck with the figures of the pine tree, the deer
and the fish, emblems of the territory and the fisheries
secured in 1783. He had it engraved anew in 1815 with the
motto, "Piscemur, venemur, ut olim." I have in my possession
an impression taken from the original seal of 1815. This
letter from John Quincy Adams tells its story:

"QUINCY, September 3, 1836.

_"My Dear Son:_ On this day, the anniversary of the definitive
treaty of peace of 1783, whereby the independence of the United
States of America was recognized, and the anniversary of your
own marriage, I give you a seal, the impression upon which
was a device of my father, to commemorate the successful assertion
of two great interests in the negotiation for the peace, the
liberty of the fisheries, and the boundary securing the acquisition
of the western lands. The deer, the pine tree, and the fish
are the emblems representing those interests.

"The seal which my father had engraved in 1783 was without
the motto. He gave it in his lifetime to your deceased brother
John, to whose family it belongs. That which I now give to
you I had engraved by his direction at London in 1815, shortly
after the conclusion of the treaty of peace at Ghent, on the
24th of December, 1814, at the negotiation of which the same
interests, the fisheries, and the bounty had been deeply involved.
The motto, 'Piscemur, venemur, ut olim,' is from Horac