720 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION E. 
Here we gain a glimpse of at least one reason why the Portuguese 
historians make no reference to Abreu’s visit to the Arus and 
New Guinea. These places lay outside of the Portuguese Hemi- 
sphere, and it would not have been expedient to enlighten the 
Spaniards regarding newly-discovered land within their boundary. 
For the Spaniards did not accept a delimitation which placed the 
Moluccas outside of their hemisphere. It must be remembered, 
in justification of the Spanish claim, now known to have been 
erroneous, that the existence of the wide Pacific, and all its 
enchanting islands, was not even surmised at the period of which 
we speak. It was not till Magellan had actually crossed it that 
the Spaniards had any idea of the distance from the new world 
discovered by Columbus to the old world of Ptolemy and the 
ancients ; and even after that voyage, and in consequence of 
miscalculations of longitude made in the course of it, the width 
of the Pacific was greatly under estimated. 
To find a short and direct passage to the much-coveted Islands 
of Spices was the great ambition both of Spaniards and Portuguese 
before the eventual discovery of Magellan. Columbus held that 
a strait existed through the Panama Isthmus, misunderstanding, 
perhaps, the accounts which he received from the Indians of a 
sea beyond the isthmus. One of the objects of his last voyage 
of 1502 was the discovery of such a strait. Further south, to 
the coasts of Brazil and Patagonia, the Portuguese, from 1501 
onwards, were continually sending out expeditions in search of 
such a passage, and several breaks in the coast-line, such as the 
mouth of the Rio de la Plata and the Gulf of St. Mathias, had 
been taken for the entrances of straits. 
The idea of finding a strait by sailing eastward from the so-called 
South Sea into the Atlantic occurred to the Spaniards immediately 
after they had established themselves in Darien. And it is not 
unlikely that the idea of making the discovery by sailing round 
the Cape of Good Hope and on eastwards until they reached the 
Columbian land-barrier may have occurred to the Portuguese. 
Albuquerque, we know, held that the distance from Malacca to 
Brazil was only a short one. This appears from one of his letters 
to Dom Manoel. (Cartas de Albuquerque. I, 64-65.) And 
there would be nothing unreasonable in conjecturing that Albu- 
querque had ordered Abreu to sail on till he reached the new 
world with the object of reconnoitring it in the hope of finding a 
passage through it, should the time at his disposal permit. That 
Abreu thought he had made a discovery of some importance is 
evident from his desire to return at once to Dom Manoel with the 
news that the way to Banda was open. But the eastern route to 
Banda had been known to be open ever since the discovery of the 
Cape route. It was the western route that it was feared was 
closed by intervening land of great extent and to say that the 
