Alexander's Bull and the treaty of Tordesillas and others based thereon all null and void. Spain secured unquestioned possession of the Philippine Islands, while the boundaries of Brazil were drawn for the most part as they exist to-day, partly on the basis of possession and partly on that of the physical configuration of the country.[1]
The execution of this treaty in turn gave rise to conflicts, and in 1761 it was abrogated. So far as Spain and Portugal are concerned the story closes with the boundary treaty of 1779.[2]
A brief glance may now be given to the attitude of other nations toward the demarcation lines. In regard to England it is, I think, not without significance that Henry the Seventh's letters patent to John Cabot seem intentionally to avoid flagrant conflict with the rights of Spain, for Cabot was commissioned to explore "all parts, regions and bays of the Eastern, Western, and Northern Sea." Spain's field of discovery by the Demarcation Bull lay south and west of the line, but Cabot is not authorized to go in a southerly direction from England. We may say, then, that although Cabot's voyage did not respect the rights of Spain in full, the king evidently desired to respect them in spirit so far as he could without relinquishing the enterprise altogether.
Richard Hakluyt in his Discourse concerning Western Planting which was written in 1584 at Ralegh's request to interest Elizabeth in colonial expansion, devotes a long chapter to "An Aunswer to the Bull of the Donation of all the West Indies graunted to the Kinges of Spaine by Pope Alexander the VIth, whoe was himselfe a Spanairde borne."[3] In 1613 the Spanish Secretary of State protested against the English settlements in Virginia and the Bermudas on the
- ↑ The text of the treaty of 1750 is in Martens, Supplément au Recueil des traités de paix, I, 378-422, and in the Statement by the United States of Brazil to the President of the United States of America. New York, III. It is summarized in Baum and in L'Art de Vérifer les Dates, XIV, 148–149.
- ↑ Baum, 52.
- ↑ Documentary History of Maine, II, 129–151. This essay of Hakluyt's is included in Goldsmid's edition of the Voyages.
