At another important point Albuquerque strengthened the Portuguese position. Before succeeding to the chief command he had set up a small Portuguese factory at the ancient port of Hormuz, near the entrance of the Persian Gulf. From this the Portuguese had advanced to obtaining control of the customs payable on Persian exports to India. Albuquerque now obtained the surrender of the fort of Hormuz, with the command of the entire import trade from India to Persia, as well as. through Mesopotamia to Aleppo, and Beyrut on the Mediterranean. At the time of his death he was preparing an expedition for the conquest of Aden, the only thing which seemed still undone in order to give Portugal complete control of the eastern seas, being, in his own words, “ the closing of the gates of the Straits.” He died at Goa, habited as a. commendador of the Order of Santiago. By his will he desired that his bones should be carried to Portugal. This was strenuously opposed by the settlers of Goa, who believed their city to be only safe so long as the bones of the great commander remained among them; nor was it until fifty years later, when the Portuguese dominion seemed absolutely safe from attack, that they were at length removed to Lisbon. During these fifty years the main features of his scheme had been carried out. Unmolested access to all the trading stations in the Far East was obtained, and of many the Portuguese were in uncontrolled possession. In other places they shared the trade with those whom they had hoped to expel. Albuquerque’s scheme for seizing and holding the Red Sea was abandoned : and the culmination of the Portuguese successes in the East was followed by the rapid decline of their power. We must now recur to the situation of other European powers at the time of Dom Manoel’s succession to the throne in 1495.
Not merely were the Spaniards by this time actively preparing for the exploration and effective occupation of their newly acquired transatlantic islands; but Englishmen, who had so long been prosecuting westward discovery, and whose king, Henry VII, had barely missed the prize which had fallen to the lot of Spain, now bestirred themselves once more. Bristol was at this time one of the most considerable ports in Europe; its merchants and seamen vied with those of Genoa and Venice, and skilled navigators from those great ports here found ready employment. Doubtless in 1495, or earlier, the news of Colombo’s success in a quest which Bristol men had long made an interest of their own roused its merchants to activity; and John Cabot, a citizen of Venice, though of Genoese extraction, became the chosen instrument of their designs. Cabot’s three sons, Lewis, Sebastian, and Sanctus, had apparently all been educated to his own calling; and on March 5, 1496, Henry VII granted a petition preferred by the father and sons, praying the sanction of the Crown to a voyage contemplated by them in search of unknown countries, understood or believed to exist beyond the ocean in northern latitudes. Having regard to the large commerce carried on between Bristol and Iceland, and to the continuity of Icelandic tradition, embodied in the Sagas, we entertain no doubt that the intention was to seek the “New Land,” “New Isle,” or “Vineland” of the Northmen; and this conclusion is borne out by the course actually taken when the voyage was begun. Pursuant to this petition, still preserved in the Public Record Office, the Privy Seal was on the same day affixed to the first charter authorising its holders to hoist the English flag on shores hitherto unknown to Christian people, and to acquire the sovereignty of them for the English Crown. This charter, and the voyage made pursuant to it, were put forward in a later generation, and are still sometimes regarded, as the root of England’s title to her American possessions; and the date of the letters patent (March 5, 1496) has not ineptly been styled the birthday of the British Empire. It is stipulated that the grantees, who are authorised to enter the Northern, Western, and Eastern seas, but not the Southern, shall after each voyage return to the port of Bristol; that they shall then and there pay to the Crown, in money or merchandise, one-fifth of their net profits: that they shall be allowed to import their goods free of customs : and that no English subject shall frequent the continents, islands, villages, towns, castles, and places generally frequented by them without their licence. While the Cabot grant disregards the Pope’s supposed partition of the globe between Portugal and Spain, it forbids, by implication, any intrusion into those southern seas in which each of these powers had already acquired territory by actual occupation. Colombo’s discoveries were as yet limited to the chain of islands separating the Caribbean Sea from the Atlantic; the Portuguese had not as yet set foot on American soil. The voyage of Cabot, which had no practical results, and was soon well-nigh forgotten, will be briefly noticed in our next chapter. Englishmen, eminently practical, saw in the intelligence brought back by him no promise of a profitable commerce, or indeed of commerce at all; nor did English colonial ideas take a definite shape until nearly a century later.
Meanwhile the Spanish monarchs, anxious to ascertain the extent > of their trans-oceanic possessions and to secure them from intrusion, licensed Vicente Yafiez Pinzon, who had commanded a vessel under Colombo in his first voyage, to prosecute the discovery of the supposed coast of Eastern Asia. Pinzon was directed to avoid interference with the private rights acquired by Colombo, and to visit only the coast to southward of the Orinoco, the limit of Colombo’s explorations. Starting from the Cape Verde Islands on November 14, 1499, and having on board Americo Vespucci, through whose narrative the voyage became well known, though the name of the captain who conducted it was suppressed, Pinzon stood to the south-west and struck the coast of Brazil near Cape St Augustin in the State of Pernambuco. Sailing northwards along the coast, he rounded Cape San Roque, the north-western promontory of South America, coasted along the north-eastern shore of Brazil and the coasts of Guiana and Venezuela, passing the mouth of the Amazon river, the rivers of Guiana, and the Orinoco, and reached the Gulf of Paria, whence he made his way back to Europe, bringing with him thirty Indian captives and a quantity of strange vegetable products, including various dye-woods, whence the coast ultimately obtained its permanent name of “ Brazil.” When these new discoveries were laid down on the chart, it became manifest that a considerable part of them were to the east of the 370 leagues’ line, agreed on in 1494 as the boundary between the Spanish and Portuguese areas of enterprise; and by a singular accident these very coasts were reached in the last year of the fifteenth century by Pedro Alvarez Cabral, the commander of the second Portuguese expedition to India and the Far East. Like Da Gama himself, Cabral proposed to cross from the Cape Verde Islands to the Cape of Good Hope athwart the open sea, making, for the reason already given in our description of Da Gama’s voyage, an immense circuit to the westward. In so doing he lost sight as might be anticipated, of one of his ships; while seeking her he lost his course, and unexpectedly descried land. It was the Brazilian coast, the mountain range called Pascoal, in the State of Bahia, to the south of the spot where Pinzon had landed three months previously. Having