Note Back to Main Text — Chapter VI · THE FINDING OF STRANGE COASTS.

On the following day Alexander issued a second bull in order to prevent any occasion for quarrel between Spain and Portugal.[546] He decreed that all lands discovered or to be discovered to the west of a meridian one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde islands should belong to the Spaniards. Inasmuch as between the westernmost of the Azores and the easternmost of the Cape Verde group the difference in longitude is not far from ten degrees, this description must be allowed to be somewhat vague, especially in a document emanating from "certain knowledge;"[547] and it left open a source of future disputes which one would suppose the "plenitude of apostolic power" might have been worthily employed in closing. The meridian 25° W., however, would have satisfied the conditions, and the equitable intent of the arrangement is manifest. The Portuguese were left free to pursue their course of discovery and conquest along the routes which they had always preferred. King John, however, was not satisfied. He entertained vague hopes of finding spice islands, or something worth having, in the western waters; and he wished to have the Line of Demarcation carried farther to the west. After a year of diplomatic wrangling a treaty was signed at Treaty of Tordesillas. Tordesillas, June 7, 1494, in which Spain consented to the moving of the line to a distance of 370 leagues west from the Cape Verde islands.[548] It would thus on a modern map fall somewhere between the 41st and 44th meridians west of Greenwich. This amendment had important and curious consequences. It presently gave the Brazilian coast to the Portuguese, and thereupon played a leading part in the singular and complicated series of events that ended in giving the name of Americus Vespucius to that region, whence it was afterwards gradually extended to the whole western hemisphere.[549]