scholars Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Rura, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg record that this commonly resulted in Spanish invaders reading the document aloud "in the night to the trees" or reading it "to the land from their ships". The scholars remark: "so much for legal formalism and the free will and natural law rights of New World Indigenous peoples." England and France, both still Catholic countries in 1493, worked to "re-interpret" the Doctrine of Discovery to serve their own colonial interests. In the 16th century, England established a new interpretation of the Doctrine: "the new theory, primarily developed by English legal scholars, argued that the Catholic King Henry VII of England would not violate the 1493 papal bulls, which divided the world for the Spanish and Portuguese". This interpretation was also supported by Elizabeth I's legal advisors in the 1580s and effectively set a precedent among European colonial nations that the first Christian nation to occupy land was the "legal" owner and that this had to be respected in international law. This rationale was used in the colonization of what became Britain's Thirteen Colonies in mainland east-coast North America. King James I stated in the First Virginia Charter (1606) and in the Charter to the Council of New England (1620) that colonists could be given property rights because the lands were "not now actually possessed by any Christian Prince or People". English monarchs decreed that colonists should spread Christianity "to those [who] as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, [and] to bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human civility, and to a settled and quiet Government". This approach to colonization of newly "discovered" lands resulted in an acceleration of exploration and land-claiming, particularly by France, England, and Holland. Land claims were made through symbolic "rituals of discovery" that were performed to illustrate the colonizing state's legal claim to the land. Markers of possession such as crosses, flags, and plates claiming possession and other symbols became important in this contest to claim Indigenous lands. In 1642, Dutch explorers were ordered to set up posts and a plate that asserted their intention to establish a colony on the land. In the 1740s, French explorers buried lead plates at various locations to reestablish their 17th-century land claims to Ohio country. The French plates were later discovered by Indigenous peoples of