orever "all dominions, camps, posts, and
villages, with all the rights and jurisdictions pertaining to them,"
west of the parallel, and leaving to Portugal all that fell to the east
of it. Portugal promptly protested that the line was too far east, and
by the treaty of Tordesillas; [Sidenote: 1494] it was moved to 370
leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, thus falling between the 48th
and 49th parallel of longitude. The intention was doubtless to confer
on Spain all land immediately west of the Atlantic, but, as a matter of
fact, South America thrusts so far to the eastward, that a portion of
her territory, later claimed as Brazil, fell to the lot of Portugal.

[Sidenote: Spanish adventurers]

Spain lost no time in exploiting her new dominions, during the next
century hundreds of ships carried tens thousands of adventurers to seek
their fortune in the west. For it was not as colonists that most of
them went, but in a spirit compounded of that of the crusader, the
knight-errant, and the pirate. If there is anything in the paradox
that artists have created natural beauty, it is a truer one to say that
the Spanish romances created the Spanish colonial empire. The men who
sailed on the great adventure had feasted {436} on tales of paladins
and hippogrifs, of enchanted palaces and fountains of youth, and
miraculously fair women to be rescued and then claimed by knights.
They read in books of travel purporting to tell the sober truth of
satyrs and of purple unicorns and of men who spread their feet over
their heads for umbrellas and of others whose heads grew between their
shoulders. No wonder that when they went to a strange country they
found the River of Life in the Orinoco, colonies of Amazons in the
jungle, and El Dorado, the land of gold, in the riches of Mexico and
Peru! It is a testimony to the imaginative mood of Europe, as well as
to the power of the pen, that the whole continent came to be called,
not after its discoverer, but after the man who wrote the best
romances--mostly fictions--about his travels in it.

[Sidenote: Exploitation of natives]

In the Greater Antilles, where Spain made her first colonies, her rule
showed at its worst. The soft native race, the Caribs, almost
completely disappeared within half a century. The best modern
authority estimates that whereas the native population of Espanola
(Haiti) was between 200,000 and 300,000 in 1493, by 1548 hardly 5000
Indians were left. In part