Malacca and Maluco, the "islands in which cloves grow, belonged to the Emperor on account of the Demarcation Line," and that he could prove it. They replied that they knew he was speaking the truth, but it could not be helped because the Emperor "could not navigate through the sea within the demarcation of the king of Portugal. Magellan said to them: 'If you would give me ships and men I would show you navigation to those parts, without touching any sea or land of the king of Portugal.'"[1]
As has been already remarked, to get at the land of spices was the prime object of all the age of discovery. As the papal grants to Portugal of the exclusive use of the eastern route to the Indies made it an object for Ferdinand and Isabella to promote the projects of Columbus to reach the land of spices and thus led to the discovery of America, so the establishment of the Demarcation Line, coupled with the same unfailing attraction exerted by the land of spices, after the new world was found not to be the Indies, led Charles V. to welcome Magellan's plan to find an all Spanish route to these precious islands and to prove that they belonged to Spain, and thus opened the way for another of the greatest exploits in the history of the race.[2] The value of the spice trade and the consequent strength of this inducement may
- ↑ Quoted from the translation of the passages of the Lendas da India, II, ch. xiv (Hakluyt Soc. ed.), given by Lord Stanley, First Voyage, 244–46. Compare also the "Contract and Agreement made by the King of Castile with Fernan Magellan," which is given in abridgment in Lord Stanley's First Voyage, 29. "Since you Fernando de Magallanes . . . wish to render us a great service in the limits which belong to us in the ocean within the bounds of our demarcation. . . . Firstly, that you are to go with good luck to discover the part of the ocean within our limits and demarcation. . . . Also, you may discover in any of those parts what has not yet been discovered, so, that you do not discover nor do anything in the demarcation and limits of the most serene King of Portugal, my very dear and well beloved Uncle and brother, nor to his prejudice; but only within the limits of our demarcation." The original document is in Navarrete, IV, 116–121.
- ↑ The only practicable way to test the Spanish claim to the Moluccas was to reach them from the west, for "they considered it a very doubtful and dangerous enterprise to go through the limits of the Portuguese, and so to the east." Max. Transylvanus, in Lord Stanley's First Voyage, 188.
