the kingdoms of the Two Sicilies, the duchy of Milan, and
certain fortresses and districts of Tuscany, in Europe; the kingdom of
Barbary, the coast of Guinea, and an indefinite and unmeasured expanse.
of other territory, in Africa; the controlling outposts and cities all
along the coast of the two Indian peninsulas, with as much of the country
as it seemed good to occupy, the straits and the great archipelagoes, so
far as they had--been visited by Europeans, in Asia; Peru, Brazil,
Mexico, the Antilles--the whole recently discovered fourth quarter of the
world in short, from the "Land of Fire" in the South to the frozen
regions of the North--as much territory as the Spanish and Portuguese
sea-captains could circumnavigate and the pope in the plentitude of his
power and his generosity could bestow on his fortunate son, in America;
all this enormous proportion of the habitable globe was the private
property, of Philip; who was the son of Charles, who was the son of
Joanna, who was the daughter of Isabella, whose husband was Ferdinand. By
what seems to us the most whimsical of political arrangements, the Papuan
islander, the Calabrian peasant, the Amsterdam merchant, the
semi-civilized Aztec, the Moor of Barbary, the Castilian grandee, the
roving Camanche, the Guinea negro, the Indian Brahmin, found
themselves--could they but have known it--fellow-citizens of one
commonwealth. Statutes of family descent, aided by fraud, force, and
chicane, had annexed the various European sovereignties to the crown of
Spain; the genius of a Genoese sailor had given to it the New World, and
more recently the conquest of Portugal, torn from hands not strong enough
to defend the national independence, had vested in the same sovereignty
those Oriental possessions which were due to the enterprise of Vasco de
Gama, his comrades and successors. The voyager, setting forth from the
straits of Gibraltar, circumnavigating the African headlands and Cape
Comorin, and sailing through the Molucca channel and past the isles which
bore the name of Philip in the Eastern sea, gave the hand at last to his
adventurous comrade, who, starting from the same point, and following
westward in the track of Magellaens and under the Southern Cross, coasted
the shore of Patagonia, and threaded his path through unmapped and
unnumbered clusters of islands in the Western Pacific; and during this
spanning of the earth's whole circumference not an inch of land or water
was tra