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 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