mbus have asked her aid in vain,
had she not previously committed herself to the enterprise of reaching
India eastward, a purpose brilliantly fulfilled when, in 1498, Vasco da
Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed to Calicut, on the coast
of Malabar. Already before this Spain and Portugal were rivals in the
search for new lands, and Pope Alexander VI. had had to be appealed to,
to fix their fields. By his bull of May 3, 4, 1493, he ordained as the
separating line the meridian passing through a point one hundred leagues
west of the Azores, where Columbus had observed the needle of his
compass to point without deflection toward the north star. Portugal
objecting to this boundary as excluding her from the longitude of the
newly found Indies, by the treaty of Tordesillas, June 7, 1494, the two
powers, with the Pope's assent, moved the line two hundred and seventy
leagues still farther west. At this time neither party dreamed of the
complications destined subsequently to arise in reference to the
position of this meridian on the other side of the globe.

[Illustration: Vasco da Gama; From an old print.]

The meridian of the Tordesillas convention had been supposed still to
give Spain all the American discoveries likely to be made, it being
ascertained only later that by it Portugal had obtained a considerable
part of the South American mainland Brazil, we know, was, till in 1822
it became independent, a Portuguese dependency. Spain, however, retained
both groups of the Antilles with the entire main about the Gulf of
Mexico, and became the earliest great principality in the western world.

[1506-1513]

Before the death of Columbus, Spain had taken firm possession of Cuba,
Porto Rico, and St. Domingo, and she stood ready to seize any of the
adjoining islands or lands so soon as gold, pearls, or aught else of
value should be found there. Cruises of discovery were made in every
direction, first, indeed, in Central and South America. In 1506 de Solis
sailed along the eastern coast of Yucatan. In 1513 the governor of a
colony on the Isthmus of Darien, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, from the top of
a lofty mountain on the isthmus, saw what is now called the Pacific
Ocean. He designated it the South Sea, a name which it habitually bore
till far into the eighteenth century. From this time the exploration and
settlement of the western coast, both up and down, went on with little
interruption, but this history, somewhat foreign to o