Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/108

 66 THE QUEST FOR INDIA BY SEA Portugal, June 7, 1494, each nation was to despatch one or two caravels to the Canaries with pilots and " astrologers " to mark off 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Apart from international intrigues, the first essential toward the ascertainment of the line, namely the verified measurement of a degree on a great circle, was not ar- rived at till a cen- tury and a half later, in 1669. The line appears on the Cantino map of 1502, but a pre- cise determination of longitude, on which the demarcation de- pended, was beyond the resources of that age. Such questions of detail did not materially affect the authority of the Papal award; all the sovereigns at that time within the concert of Christendom ac- cepted the Pope's partition of the unknown world between Portugal and Spain. Even princes, like our later Tudors, who renounced their spiritual allegiance to Rome, shrank for a time from openly assailing a political settlement which had become part of the pub- lic law of Europe. A CARAVEL. After a manuscript at Havre.