Spain, too, indulging in an awakening yawn, was clutching with her outstretched hands at the shadowy treasure-islands of an unfinished dream.

England had not yet launched her navy; Holland had not built hers.

Portugal had already buried a king—­the great grandson of Edward III. of England—­whose enterprise had won for him the name of Henry the Navigator.

Slowly and sadly—­slowly always, sadly often—­his vessels had crept down the west coast of Africa; little by little one captain had overstepped the distance traversed by his predecessor, until at last in 1497 a successful voyager actually rounded the Cape.

Then Portugal, clear of the long wall that had fenced her in on one side for so many thousands of miles, trod the vast expanse of waters to the east, and soon began to plant her flag in various ports of the Indian Ocean. [See Portuguese flags on Desliens’ Map.]

Pushing on further east in search of the Spice Islands, she found Sumatra, Borneo, the Celebes, Java, Timor, Ceram, the Aru Islands and Gilolo; she had reached the famous and much coveted Moluccas, or Spice Islands, and set to work building forts and establishing trading stations in the same way as England is doing nowadays in South Africa and elsewhere.*

[* In a chart of the East Indian Archipelago, drawn probably during the first Portuguese voyages to the Spice Islands (1511-1513), the island of Gilolo is called Papoia.  Many of the islands situated on the west and north-west coast of New Guinea became known to the Portuguese at an early date, and were named collectively Os Papuas.  The name was subsequently given to the western parts of New Guinea.  Menezes, a Portuguese navigator, is said to have been driven by a storm to some of these islands, where he remained awaiting the monsoonal change.]

Meanwhile the Spaniards, after the discovery of America by Columbus, were pursuing their navigations and explorations westward with the same object in view, and it soon dawned upon them that a vast ocean separated them from the islands discovered by the Portuguese.

Magellan was then sent out in search of a westerly passage; he reached the regions where the Portuguese had established themselves, and disputes arose as to the limits of the Portuguese and Spanish boundaries.

Pope Alexander VI. had generously bestowed one-half of the undiscovered world upon the Spanish, and the other half upon the Portuguese, charging each nation with the conversion of the heathen within its prospective domains.

Merely as a fact this is interesting enough, but viewed in the light of subsequent events it assumes a specific importance.

The actual size of the earth was not known at the time, and this division of Pope Alexander’s, measured from the other side of the world, resulted in an overlapping and duplicate charting of the Portuguese and Spanish boundaries in the longitudes of the Spice Islands,* an overlapping due, no doubt, principally to the desire of each contending party to include the Spice Islands within its own hemisphere, but also to the fact that the point of departure which had been fixed in the vicinity of the Azores, was subsequently removed westward as far as the mouth of the Amazons.