of a closed season at the Moluccas.[1] They asserted the Spanish ownership of the Moluccas.[2] The king of Portugal refused the terms proposed.
January 25, 1524, plenipotentiaries were appointed and by February 19, it was agreed that each side should appoint three astrologers and three pilots as scientific experts, and three lawyers as judges of documentary proofs, to meet in convention in March on the boundary of Spain and Portugal between Badajos and Yelves. Meanwhile neither side should send vessels to the Moluccas until the end of May.[3]
At this famous assemblage, known as the Badajos Junta, we find among the Spanish experts Ferdinand Columbus and Sebastian del Cano who had accompanied Magellan, and as advisers, Sebastian Cabot and Juan Vespucci, the nephew of Amerigo.
The first session opened April 11, on the bridge over the Caya, the boundary line, and thereafter the meetings were held alternately in Badajos and Yelves, dragging along till May 31. Even the street urchins followed with curious eyes the men who were dividing the world.[4]
- ↑ Navarrete, IV, 302–305.
- ↑ On what has been called Schöner's Globe, of 1523, more exactly the Rosenthal Gores, the line is drawn near the middle of the Peninsula of Malacca. Nordenskiöld dates these gores from 1540. Winsor, Christopher Columbus, 589, the gores are reproduced on p. 590. The Demarcation Line is drawn as the Spaniards drew it, after the Badajos Junta, a valid argument that these gores were made later than May, 1524.
- ↑ Navarrete, IV, 320–326.
- ↑ "Acontecio que passeando se un dia por la ribera de Guadiana Francisco de Melo, Diego Lopes de Sequiera, y otros de aquellos Portugueses, les pregunto un niño que guardava los trapos, que su madre lavava, si eran ellos los que repartian el mundo con el emperador, y como le respondieron que si, alço la camisa, mostro las nalguillas, y dixo, pues echad la raya por aqui en medio. Cosa fue publica, y muy reida en Badajos, y en la congregacion de los mesmos repartidores." Gomara, I, leaf 141, reverse. Gomara's account of the conference was translated by Richard Eden, and may be read in Edward Arber's First Three English Books on America, 271–274. Hakluyt moralizes over the small boy's jest: "But what wise man seeth not that God by that childe laughed them to scorne, and made them rediculous and their partition in the eyes of the world." "Discourse concerning Western Planting," Doc. Hist. Maine, II, 141–42.
