International audience ; The juridical conflict concerning the merchant vessel De Vriendschap, boarded and inspected by the English in the spring of 1745, reflects the difficulty in respecting international treaties and the imperatives of war. After becoming a neutral power in the eighteenth century, the Dutch Republic tried to preserve its commercial shipping under the motto ‘free ship, free goods’, drawing on old treaties such as that concluded with England in 1674. The aim was to bag the freight and at the same time to prevent the nations at war from declaring the cargoes of Dutch merchants ‘bonne prise’. During the War of Austrian Succession, the situation in the Mediterranean deteriorated around 1744–1745, when the increasingly exasperated English seized neutral merchantmen carrying merchandise for France. Very different actors then intervened and imagined pragmatic solutions for complex tangles. A direct negotiation at the highest level led to the repudiation of the Admiralty of Port Mahon.