Among the Portuguese, who thus became acquainted with the Spice Islands of eastern Malaysia, was Fernão de Magalhaẽs--stupidly miscalled, in English literature, MAGELLAN. His earlier story has already been told in a previous volume of this series.[25] Having been very badly treated by the King of Portugal, Magellan and several of his friends and relations passed over into the service of the united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, which were about to become the great kingdom of Spain. It will be remembered by the reader that, in 1494, the King of Portugal and the King and Queen of Aragon-Castile, to avoid quarrelling about the marvellous discoveries their adventurers were making, had concluded the Treaty of Tordesillas under the auspices of the Pope, a treaty which practically divided between these kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula all the non-Christian world outside Europe and the Turkish Empire. Their boundaries were a meridian of longitude running from pole to pole, and cutting the globe into two divisions. The meridian was fixed at a distance of 1110 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, and more or less coincident with the fiftieth degree of longitude west of Greenwich. Consequently, in the west it gave Portugal the Brazilian part of the South American continent; while on the other side of the globe the corresponding meridian (130° E. of Greenwich) cut off the Portuguese from entering into possession of all Australasia, and afforded Spain the pretext of attempting to reach Malaysia from the east (across the Pacific), and thus of laying claim to the Spice Islands which might be found to lie outside the Portuguese sphere. [As a matter of fact, when the longitude was correctly calculated, both Philippines and Moluccas lay in the Portuguese domain.] The great Spanish adventurer, Nuñez de Balboa, had in 1513, "from a peak in Darien" near the isthmus of Panama, sighted the Pacific Ocean, which the Spaniards at first called the Southern Sea. The Portuguese realization of the wide ocean which lay to the east of Malaysia, combined with the news that Central America had on the western side of it an ocean at least as vast as the Atlantic, decided Magellan to propose to the new ruler of Spain, the Emperor Charles V, the great project of finding a way round--or a strait through--South America, and the complete fulfilment of the original plan of Columbus--the reaching of the Indies by a western route across the Atlantic. His proposals were accepted, and he was given, in 1518, command over a little fleet of five ships,[26] the largest of which (the _San Antonio_) was only 120 tons in capacity and the smallest 75 tons. He left Spain on September 21, 1519, to search for this passage round or through South America to the Southern Sea. His expedition included 190 Spaniards, and a number of Portuguese, Genoese, and other Italians--including the famous Lombard geographer of those days, ANTONIO PIGAFETTA--several