vices. The terms of the grant are very significant: _or_,
two cinnamon sticks _saltire proper_, three nutmegs and twelve
cloves, a chief _gules_, a castle _or; crest_, a globe, bearing
the motto, "Primus circumdedisti me" (thou wert the first to go
round me); _supporters_, two Malay kings crowned, holding in the
exterior hand a spice branch proper. The castle, of course, refers
to Castile, but the rest of the blazon indicates the importance
attributed to the voyage as resting mainly upon the visit to the
Spice Islands. As we have already seen, however, the Portuguese
recovered their position in the Moluccas immediately after the
departure of the _Victoria_, and seven years later Charles V. gave
up any claims he might possess through Magelhaens' visit.

But for a long time afterwards the Spaniards still cast longing
eyes upon the Spice Islands, and the Fuggers, the great bankers
of Augsburg, who financed the Spanish monarch, for a long time
attempted to get possession of Peru, with the scarcely disguised
object of making it a "jumping-place" from which to make a fresh
attempt at obtaining possession of the Moluccas. A modern parallel
will doubtless occur to the reader.

There are thus three stages to be distinguished in the successive
discovery and delimitation of the New World:--

(i.) At first Columbus imagined that he had actually reached Zipangu
or Japan, and achieved the object of his voyage.

(ii.) Then Amerigo Vespucci, by coasting down South America, ascertained
that there was a huge unknown land intervening even between Columbus'
discoveries and the long-desired Spice Islands.

(iii.) Magelhaens clinches this view by traversing the Southern
Pacific for thousands of miles before reaching the Moluccas.

There is still a fourth stage by which it was gradually discovered
that the North-west of America was not joined on to Asia, but this
stage was only gradually reached and finally determined by the
voyages of Behring and Cook.

[_Authorities:_ Justin Winsor, _Christopher Columbus_, 1894; Guillemard,
_Ferdinand Magellan_, 1894.]

CHAPTER VIII

TO THE INDIES NORTHWARD--ENGLISH, FRENCH, DUTCH, AND RUSSIAN ROUTES

The discovery of the New World had the most important consequences
on the relative importance of the different nations of Europe.
Hitherto the chief centres for over two thousand years had been
round the shores of the Mediterranean, and, as we have seen, Venice,
by her central position and e