His first contention was hardly valid; the second, however, was reasonable and, as Columbus had estimated the distance from the Canaries to the new islands at over nine hundred leagues, 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), set eyes upon the great South Sea.  It soon became only too certain that the Portuguese had won in the race for the land of cloves, pepper, and nutmegs.  But, in the absence of knowledge of the true dimensions of the earth and with an underestimate of its size generally prevailing, the information that the Spice Islands lay far to the east of India