World history; World history -- Juvenile literature
In March of the year 1521 they saw land. Magellan called it the land of
the Ladrones (which means robbers) because the natives stole everything
they could lay hands on. Then further westward to the Spice Islands!
Again land was sighted. A group of lonely islands. Magellan called them
the Philippines, after Philip, the son of his master Charles V, the
Philip II of unpleasant historical memory. At first Magellan was well
received, but when he used the guns of his ships to make Christian
converts he was killed by the aborigines, together with a number of his
captains and sailors. The survivors burned one of the three remaining
ships and continued their voyage. They found the Moluccas, the famous
Spice Islands; they sighted Borneo and reached Tidor. There, one of
the two ships, too leaky to be of further use, remained behind with
her crew. The "Vittoria," under Sebastian del Cano, crossed the Indian
Ocean, missed seeing the northern coast of Australia (which was not
discovered until the first half of the seventeenth century when ships of
the Dutch East India Company explored this flat and inhospitable land),
and after great hardships reached Spain.
This was the most notable of all voyages. It had taken three years. It
had been accomplished at a great cost both of men and money. But it had
established the fact that the earth was round and that the new lands
discovered by Columbus were not a part of the Indies but a separate
continent. From that time on, Spain and Portugal devoted all their
energies to the development of their Indian and American trade. To
prevent an armed conflict between the rivals, Pope Alexander VI (the
only avowed heathen who was ever elected to this most holy office)
had obligingly divided the world into two equal parts by a line
of demarcation which followed the 50th degree of longitude west of
Greenwich, the so-called division of Tordesillas of 1494. The Portuguese
were to establish their colonies to the east of this line, the Spaniards
were to have theirs to the west. This accounts for the fact that the
entire American continent with the exception of Brazil became Spanish
and that all of the Indies and most of Africa became Portuguese until
the English and the Dutch colonists (who had no respect for Papal
decisions) took these possessions away in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account