they should cross each other's tracks priority of discovery would determine the ownership.[1]
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.[2]
The Portuguese reached India in 1498. Thirteen years later Albuquerque made conquest of Malacca of the Malay Peninsula, the great entrepôt 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.[3] Francisco Serrão, 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
- ↑ This is also Harrisse's view, Diplomatic History of America, p. 74.
- ↑ "Sábese la concession del Papa Alexandra; la division del mundo como una naranja." Letter of Alonso de Zuazo to Charles V, January 22, 1518. Docs. Inéd. de Indias, i, p. 296 (From Harrisse, p. 174). Cf. also Maximilianus Transylvanus in First Voyage Round the World by Magellan. Hakluyt Society, p. 185.
- ↑ The question is fully discussed in Guillemard's Life of Ferdinand Magellan, pp. 68–69.
