Alysha Kurani In Patricia Seed’s Ceremonies of Possession in the Europe’s Conquest of the New World: 1492-1640, several different “possession methods” were displayed from the different groups that conquered the new world. Ranging from artwork, to astrological maps, to a reading of submission, each group devised their own technique when claiming a new land. Physical demarkation was the main practice the English used to symbolize the ownership of new land. The methods they used to mark such territory were the building of houses, gardens, and constructing fences. Houses created a legal right to the land. As declared by Seed, “ building the first house was critical to the initial stages of English settlement in the first place because …show more content…

Although, this wasn’t accepted as proper claim of land the Portuguese saw it as fit. This, like the Spanish, was influenced again by the Islamic people. “While Islamic astronomers had virtually disappeared from Portugal by the fifteenth century, the traditions remained still vibrant in the hands of Jewish astronomers and mathematicians who had been their traditional collaborators and peers. They in turn used their scientific knowledge of astronomy and trigonometry to solve the practical problems of navigations, and application never developed by its Islamic counterpart.” The Portuguese also used nautical mapping to claim new territory. Seed’s states, “they initially relied upon a compass developed by the Chinese and brought to the West by Moslems...” While discovering all of these new lands the Portuguese created charts “to keep track of the new regions they encountered…” To properly mark the locations of their discoveries the Portuguese used numbers. They created a system of numbers that would tell the exact location of what they discovered and what seemed to be rightfully theirs. This is systems of numbers, which we call today