e Spaniards furnishing their envoys with double sets of letters and
documents so that they could be prepared to counter any movement on the
part of King John. The idea of the Portuguese was that the line of
demarcation should be a parallel rather than a meridian; and that
everything north of the Canaries should belong to Spain and everything
south to Portugal; but this would never do from the Spanish point of
view. The fact that a proposal had come from Portugal, however, gave
Ferdinand an opportunity of delaying the diplomatic proceedings until his
own expedition was actually ready to set sail; and he wrote to Columbus
repeatedly, urging him to make all possible haste with his preparations.
In the meantime he despatched a solemn embassy to Portugal, the purport
of which, much beclouded and delayed by preliminary and impossible
proposals, was to submit the whole question to the Pope for arbitration.
And all the time he was busy petitioning the Pope to restore to Spain
those concessions granted in the second Bull, but taken away again in the
third.

This, being much egged on to it, the Pope ultimately did; waking up on
September 26th, the day after Columbus's departure, and issuing another
Bull in which the Spanish Sovereigns were given all lands and islands,
discovered or not discovered, which might be found by sailing west and
south. Four Bulls; and after puzzling over them for a year, the Kings of
Spain and Portugal decided to make their own Bull, and abide by it,
which, having appointed commissioners, they did on June 7, 1494., when by
the Treaty of Tordecillas the line of demarcation was finally fixed to
pass from north to south through a point 370 leagues west of the Cape
Verde Islands.

CHAPTER V

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

July, August, and September in the year 1493 were busy months for
Columbus, who had to superintend the buying or building and fitting of
ships, the choice and collection of stores, and the selection of his
company. There were fourteen caravels, some of them of low tonnage and
light draught, and suitable for the navigation of rivers; and three large
carracks, or ships of three to four hundred tons. The number of
volunteers asked for was a thousand, but at least two thousand applied
for permission to go with the expedition, and ultimately some fourteen or
fifteen hundred did actually go, one hundred stowaways being included in
the number. Unfortunately these adventurers were of a class c