On the World’s Seas and Oceans - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 32

Figure 3.2. Pacific Ocean by Abraham Ortelius, 1589
PEPPER PROPELS THE PORTUGUESE
Tiny Portugal, perched on the Atlantic edge of Europe, led the quest to find a sea route to
the Indies. League by league, its ships moved south along the western coast of Africa, re-
turning wealth to Portugal: ivory, gold, and slaves. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the
Cape of Good Hope; ten years later Vasco da Gamma reached the pepper groves of In-
dia. By 1520, the Portuguese had sailed to the Spice Islands, the Moluccas, in today's In-
donesia. Pepper from India and spices from the Moluccas now made Portugal exceedingly
rich. To crown their success, and not a little influenced by their wealth, Pope Alexander VI
awarded Portugal the right to convert (and control) heathen people living to the east of the
Portuguese-controlled Azores Islands.
Between Bartolomeu and Vasco, in 1492 Columbus claimed the Caribbean Sea, all
islands in it, and all lands surrounding it on behalf of Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers of
Aragon and Castile. To quash the likelihood of competing claims and jurisdictions, the
Pope negotiated a pact between the Iberians, the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). The Pope
drew an imaginary line on the globe, from pole to pole. All non-Christian lands 370 leagues
west of the Cape Verde Islands belonged to Spain. All non-Christian lands east of the
islands fell to Portuguese control.
BALBOA LOOKS WEST
Then I felt like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent on a peak in Darien
— John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” (sonnet, 1816)
Vasco de Balboa (mistakenly referred to as Cortez by Keats) was the first European to see
the Pacific Ocean. He was in the Isthmus of Panama, on the run from creditors in Hispa-
niola. In Panama he married a daughter of the local chief, Comaco, who showered Balboa
with gold. Generous Balboa shared his wedding gift with other Spaniards living, or really
hiding out, in Panama; quarrels erupted as gold was begged, borrowed, and stolen. The
chief's son chided the Spanish, telling them that to the west on the shores of a great sea,
gold lay thick on the ground.