the
Catholic sovereigns were disposed to make concessions. By the treaty
of Tordesillas, June 7, 1494, it was agreed that the Demarcation
Line should be drawn three hundred and seventy leagues west of the
Cape Verde Islands. [4] This treaty accepted the principle of the
Papal arbitration but shifted the boundary to a position supposed to
be half-way between the Cape Verde Islands and the newly discovered
islands of Cipangu and Antilia. [5]

Neither in the Papal Bulls nor in the Treaty of Tordesillas was there
any specific reference to an extension of the Line around the globe or
to a division of the world. The arrangement seems to have contemplated
a free field for the exploration and conquest of the unknown parts
of the world, to the eastward for Portugal, and to the westward for
Spain. If they should cross each other's tracks priority of discovery
would determine the ownership. [6]

The suggestion of the extension of the line around the globe and of the
idea that Spain was entitled to what might be within the hemisphere
set off by the Demarcation Line and its extension to the antipodes
does not appear until the time of Magellan, and it is then that we
first meet the notion that the Pope had divided the world between
Spain and Portugal like an orange. [7]

The Portuguese reached India in 1498. Thirteen years later Albuquerque
made conquest of Malacca of the Malay Peninsula, the great entrepot
of the spice trade; but even then the real goal, the islands where
the spices grow, had not been attained. The command of the straits,
however, promised a near realization of so many years of labor, and, as
soon as practicable, in December 1511, Albuquerque despatched Antonio
d'Abreu in search of the precious islands. A Spanish historian of the
next century affirms that Magellan accompanied d'Abreu in command of
one of the ships, but this can hardly be true. [8] Francisco Serrao,
however, one of the Portuguese captains, was a friend of Magellan's and
during his sojourn of several years in the Moluccas wrote to him of a
world larger and richer than that discovered by Vasco da Gama. It is
probable, as the historian Barros, who saw some of this correspondence,
sugguests, that Serrao somewhat exaggerated the distance from Malacca
to the Moluccas, and so planted the seed which bore such fruit in
Magellan's mind. [9]

The year after the Portuguese actually attained the Spice Islands,
Vasco Nunez de Balboa, first of Europeans (1513