Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/72

52 the New World, said he should like “to see the clause in Adam's will which entitled his brothers of Castile and Portugal to divide the New World between them.” A trifling fact as concerning this sweeping donation of a whole continent to Spaniards, as the discoverers, may not be unworthy of notice. Columbus had with him on his first voyage an Englishman and an Irishman. Unhappily for us they do not appear to have had any skill of pen to have served us as journalists of the voyage. But let us recognize them on the Spanish caravels as being there to represent the shares which have fallen to Englishmen and Irishmen on this soil; and, if we need the Pope's sanction to confirm our present territorial rights, let us find it in our ancestral claims through that valiant Englishman and his Hibernian companion.

When, soon after Columbus's return from his first voyage, the sovereigns applied to the court of Rome for an exclusive territorial title to the regions which their Admiral had discovered and might yet discover, they appear to have been persuaded that they had already secured that title by the fact of unveiling new lands in unknown seas. But influenced by jealousy of the Portuguese, who had already thus fortified their claims, they humbly asked the same sanction from his Holiness. Three successive bulls, issued in 1493, were intended to make the papal donation secure to all lands extending from the northern to the southern pole. The Portuguese at once challenged its actual and possible collision with their own prior rights. The other European sovereignties treated this exercise of the papal prerogative with utter indifference. Though they allowed nearly half a century to pass before they came into any direct rivalry with the Spaniards as they followed up their first enterprise, when French and English adventure entered on the track the Pope was not even appealed to as an arbiter. In 1611 two small Spanish vessels made a feint of assaulting the miserable English colony in Virginia, but