Henry “the Navigator” was the father of what may be called ocean, in contradistinction to coast, navigation, scientific, instead of chance navigation, although he died before the Cape of Good Hope had been doubled. After Diaz had doubled the Cape of Good Hope in 1486, the furor of every mariner was to point the prow of his vessel toward India to share in its precious gems, its beautiful and costly fabrics, articles of luxury, and its great wealth. The India fever seized all the maritime nations of Europe, Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, England, Sweden and Denmark. Christopher Columbus in 1492 sought, and thought he had found India by sailing westward. Then Rodrigo Lenzoli Borgia, a Spaniard, and the Pope, under the title of Alexander VI, assuming to be vice-gerent of the world, made a division of all the newly-discovered, or subsequently to be discovered, heathen lands between the two great Catholic powers, Spain and Portugal, by drawing a line from pole to pole one hundred leagues west of the Azores and the Cape de Verde islands (this line was subsequently changed) and declared that all lands discovered west of that line and not belonging to some Christian prince should belong to Spain, and all similar lands east of that line should belong to Portugal. The two great maritime and exploring nations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Portugal and Spain—the former in the east and the latter in the west. Alas! their great fame is in the past. Spain hoped to reach the Indies by a shorter all-water route, sailing _westward_, and that was Columbus’s mission, purpose and hope. The edict of the Pope did not, in the least, restrain France, England or the Netherlands from attempting to make discoveries, and France, England, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark granted charters to companies of their own subjects, granting them great and exclusive rights, and calling them East India companies. At the close of the year A. D. 1600, Queen Elizabeth chartered the English East India Company with most extraordinary rights and privileges, and thus laid the foundations for Great Britain’s Asiatic empire. The Dutch East India Company charter was granted in 1602, to trade to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Magellan for twenty-one years, and no other of the East India companies has been so successfully managed. The Dutch have derived large revenue from the islands they still hold there, viz.: Java, the Moluccas or Spice islands, a large part of Borneo, Sumatra, Celebes and several small islands in the Malay Archipelago.