Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/287

 TERRITORIAL CLAIMS OF THE COMPANY 227 Portuguese settlements on the western coast of India, and to Tidore and Amboyna in the Moluccas. But it claims Bengal, Java, and the Eastern Archipelago in general as still open to the world. " In all these and infinite places more, abounding with great wealth and riches, the Portuguese and Spaniards have not any castle, fort, blockhouse or commandment." The me- morialists cite in support of their case twelve Portu- guese, Spanish, and Italian authors of European repute, besides nine English and Dutch. Their most impor- tant piece of evidence was " the notable intercepted Register, or Matricola, of the whole government of the East-India, [captured] in the Madre de Deos, 1592." The document ignored the Papal partition of the world in 1493, together with the treaty settlements based upon it, and recognized only the title of effective occupation. It marked an earlier stage of the ideas which received their full development in Cromwell's attack on San Domingo half a century later, on the ground " that the said island was not entirely occupied by Spain." The " Bull must be trampled under foot," Sir John Seeley remarks of this development in 1654, " Protestant Englishmen must assert their right of set- tling and acquiring territory." It is needless to say that Spain was not in 1600, nor for many years to come, prepared to accept this new departure in international law. What the memorialists then asked was that Spain should schedule her Indian settlements on the assump- tion that all the East that was not in her actual pos- session lay open to the world.