AMERIGO VESPUCCI.
BY SYDNEY HOWARD GAY
AMERIGO VESPUCCI,[448] the third son of Nastugio Vespucci, a notary of
Florence, and his wife Lisabetta Mini, was born on the 9th of March,
1451. The family had the respectability of wealth, acquired in trade,
for one member of it in the preceding century was rich enough to
endow a public hospital. Over the portal of the house, so dedicated
to charity by this pious Vespucci nearly three quarters of a century
before Amerigo was born, there was, says Humboldt, engraved in 1719,
more than three hundred years after the founding of the hospital, an
inscription declaring that here Amerigo had lived in his youth. As the
monks, however, who wrote the inscription also asserted in it that he
was the discoverer of America, it is quite possible that they may have
been as credulous in the one case as in the other, and have accepted
for fact that which was only tradition. But whether Amerigo’s father,
Nastugio, lived or did not live in the hospital which his father or
grandfather founded, he evidently maintained the respectability of the
family. Three of his sons he sent to be educated at the University of
Pisa. Thenceforth they are no more heard of, except that one of them,
Jerome, afterward went to Palestine, where he remained nine years, met
with many losses, and endured much suffering,—all of which he related
in a letter to his younger brother Amerigo. But the memory even of this
Jerome—that he should have ever gone anywhere, or had any adventures
worth the telling—is only preserved from oblivion because he had this
brother who became the famous navigator, and whose name by a chance was
given to half the globe.
[Illustration: A LETTER OF VESPUCIUS TO HIS FATHER (_after a fac-simile
given by Varnhagen_).
[Harrisse (_Bibl. Amer. Vet., Additions_, p. xxii) says that this
letter was found by Bandini in the Strozzi Library, and that it is now
in the collection of M. Feuillet de Conches in Paris. “This and two
or three signatures added to receipts, which were brought to light by
Navarrete, constitute,” said Harrisse in 1872, “the only autographs
of Vespucius known.” Since then another fac-simile of a letter by
Vespucius has been published in the _Cartas de Indias_, being a letter
of Dec. 9, 1508, about goods which ought to be carried to the Antilles.
Cf. _Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, xvi. 318, and _Magazine of American
History_, iii. 193, where it is translated, and accompanied by a
fac-simile of a part of it. The signature is given on another page of
the present chapter.—ED.]]
Amerigo was not sent to the university. Such early education as
he received came from a learned uncle, Giorgi Antonio Vespucci,
a Dominican friar, who must have been a man of some influence in
Florence, as it is claimed for him that he was the friend and colleague
of the more famous monk Savonarola. The nephew acknowledged later in
life that he was not among the most diligent of his uncle’s pupils;
and the admission was as true as it was ingenuous, if one may judge by
a letter in Latin written, when he was twenty-five years old, to his
father. He excuses himself to that _spectabili et egregio viro_—as he
addresses his father—for recent negligence in writing, as he hesitates
to commit himself in Latin without the revision of his uncle, and he
happens to be absent. Probably it was poverty of expression in that
tongue, and not want of thought, which makes the letter seem the work
of a boy of fifteen rather than of a young man of five and twenty. A
mercantile career in preference to that of a student was, at any rate,
his own choice; and in due time, though at what age precisely does not
appear, a place was found for him in the great commercial house of the
Princes Medici in Florence.
In Florence he remained, apparently in the service of the Medici,
till 1490; for in that year he complains that his mother prevented
him from going to Spain. But the delay was not long, as in January,
1492, he writes from Cadiz, where he was then engaged in trade with an
associate, one Donato Nicolini,—perhaps as agents of the Medici, whose
interests in Spain were large. Four years later, the name of Vespucci
appears for the first time in the Spanish archives, when he was within
two months of being forty-six years of age. Meanwhile he had engaged
in the service of Juonato Berardi, a Florentine merchant established
at Seville, who had fitted out the second expedition of Columbus in
1493.[449]
It has been conjectured that Vespucci became known at that time to
Columbus,—which is not improbable if the former was so early as 1493
in the service of Berardi. But the suggestion that he went with
Columbus either on his first or second expedition cannot be true, at
any rate as to the second.[450] For in 1495 Berardi made a contract
with the Spanish Government to furnish a fleet of ships for an
expedition westward which he did not live to complete. Its fulfilment
was intrusted to Vespucci; and it appears in the public accounts that
a sum of money was paid to him from the Treasury of the State in
January, 1496. Columbus was then absent on his second voyage, begun in
September, 1493, from which he did not return till June, 1496.
In the interval between the spring of 1495 and the summer of 1497 any
adventurer was permitted by Spain, regardless of the agreement made
with Columbus, to go upon voyages of commerce or discovery to that New
India to which his genius and courage had led the way. “Now,” wrote
Columbus, “there is not a man, down to the very tailors, who does not
beg to be allowed to become a discoverer.” The greed of the King; the
envy of the navigators who before 1492 had laughed at the theories of
Columbus; the hatred of powerful Churchmen, more bitter now than ever,
because those theories which they had denounced as heresy had proved
to be true,—all these influences were against him, and had combined to
rob the unhappy Admiral, even before he had returned from his second
voyage, of the honor and the riches which he thought would rightfully
become his own. Ships now could go and come in safety over that wide
waste of waters which even children could remember had been looked
upon as a “Sea of Darkness,” rolling westward into never-ending space,
whence there was no return to the voyager mad enough to trust to its
treacherous currents. It was no longer guarded by perpetual Night, by
monsters hideous and terrible, and by a constant wind that blew ever
toward the west. But ships came safely back, bringing, not much, but
enough of gold and pearls to seem an earnest of the promise of the
marvellous wealth of India that must soon be so easily and so quickly
reached; with the curious trappings of a picturesque barbarism; the
soft skins and gorgeous feathers of unknown beasts and birds; the woods
of a new beauty in grain and vein and colors; the aromatic herbs of
subtle virtue that would stir the blood beneath the ribs of Death; and
with all these precious things the captive men and women, of curious
complexion and unknown speech, whose people were given as a prey to the
stranger by God and the Pope. Every rough sailor of these returning
ships was greeted as a hero when to the gaping, wide-eyed crowd he told
of his adventures in that land of perpetual summer, where the untilled
virgin soil brought forth its fruits, and the harvest never failed;
where life was without care or toil, sickness or poverty; where he who
would might gather wealth as he would idly pick up pebbles on a beach.
These were the sober realities of the times; and there were few so poor
in spirit or so lacking in imagination as not to desire to share in
the possession of these new Indies. It was not long, indeed, before a
reaction came; when disappointed adventurers returned in poverty, and
sat in rags at the gates of the palace to beg relief of the King. And
when the sons of Columbus, who were pages in the Court of the Queen,
passed by, “they shouted to the very heavens, saying: ‘Look at the
sons of the Admiral of Mosquitoland!—of that man who has discovered
the lands of deceit and disappointment,—a place of sepulchre and
wretchedness to Spanish hidalgos!’”[451]
From his second voyage Columbus returned in the summer of 1496; and
meeting his enemies with the courage and energy which never failed
him, he induced the King and Queen to revoke, in June of the next
year, the decree of two years before. Meanwhile he made preparations
for his third voyage, on which he sailed from San Lucar on the 30th of
May, 1498. Two months later he came in sight of the island he named
Trinidad; and entering the Gulf of Paria, into which empties the
Orinoco by several mouths, he sailed along the coast of the mainland.
He had reached the continent, not of Asia, as he supposed, but of the
western hemisphere. None of the four voyages of the great discoverer is
so illustrative of his peculiar faith, his religious fervor, and the
strength of his imagination as this third voyage; and none, in that
respect, is so interesting. The report of it which he sent home in a
letter, with a map, to the King and Queen has a direct relation to the
supposed first voyage of Amerigo Vespucci.
As he approached the coast, Columbus wrote,[452] he heard “in the dead
of night an awful roaring;” and he saw “the sea rolling from west to
east like a mountain as high as the ship, and approaching little by
little; on the top of this rolling sea came a mighty wave roaring with
a frightful noise.” When he entered the Gulf, and saw how it was filled
by the flow of the great river, he believed that he had witnessed far
out at sea the mighty struggle at the meeting of the fresh with the
salt water. The river, he was persuaded, must be rushing down from the
summit of the earth, where the Lord had planted the earthly Paradise,
in the midst whereof was a fountain whence flowed the four great rivers
of the world,—the Ganges, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile.
He did not quite agree with those earlier philosophers who believed
that the earth was a perfect sphere; but rather that it was like “the
form of a pear, which is very round except where the stalk grows, at
which part it is most prominent; or like a round ball, upon one part
of which is a prominence like a woman’s nipple, this protrusion being
the highest and nearest the sky, situated under the equinoctial line,
and at the eastern extremity of this sea.” “I call that the eastern
extremity,” he adds, “where the land and the islands end.”
Now had come to him at last in the observations and experience of this
voyage the confirmation of his faith. That “eastern extremity of the
sea where the lands and the islands end” he had reached, he thought,
at the islands of Trinidad, of Margarita, and of Cubagua, and at the
coast of the Gulf of Paria, into which poured this great river rushing
down from the pinnacle of the globe. For he had observed, as he sailed
westward from a certain line in the ocean, that “the ships went on
rising smoothly towards the sky.” Some of the older astronomers, he
said, believed that the Arctic pole was “the highest point of the
world, and nearest to the heavens;” and others that this was true of
the Antarctic. Though all were wrong as to the exact locality of that
elevation, it was plain that they held a common faith that somewhere
there was a point of exaltation, if only it could be found, where the
earth approached the sky more nearly than anywhere else. But it had
not occurred to any of them that possibly the blessed spot which the
first rays of the sun lit up in crimson and in gold on the morning of
creation, because it was the topmost height of the globe, and because
it was in the east, might be under the equinoctial line; and it had not
occurred to them, because this eastern extremity of the world, which it
had pleased God he should now discover, had hitherto been unknown to
civilized man.
Every observation and incident of this voyage gave to Columbus proof of
the correctness of his theory. The farther south he had gone along the
African coast, the blacker and more barbarous he had found the people,
the more intense the heat, and the more arid the soil. For many days
they had sailed under an atmosphere so heated and oppressive that he
doubted if his ships would not fall to pieces and their crews perish,
if they did not speedily escape into some more temperate region. He
had remarked in former voyages that at a hundred leagues west of the
Azores there was a north-and-south line, to cross which was to find
an immediate and grateful change in the skies above, in the waters
beneath, and in the reviving temperature of the air. The course of
the ships was altered directly westward, that this line might be
reached, and the perils escaped which surrounded him and his people.
It was when the line was crossed that he observed how his ships were
gently ascending toward the skies. Not only were the expected changes
experienced, but the North Star was seen at a new altitude; the needle
of the compass varied a point, and the farther they sailed the more it
turned to the northwest. However the wind blew, the sea was always
smooth; and when the Island of Trinidad and the shores of the continent
were reached, they entered a climate of exceeding mildness, where
the fields and the foliage were “remarkably fresh and green, and as
beautiful as the gardens of Valencia in April.” The people who crowded
to the shore “in countless numbers” to gaze at these strange visitors
were “very graceful in form, tall, and elegant in their movements,
wearing their hair very long and smooth.” They were, moreover, of a
whiter skin than any the Admiral had heretofore seen “in any of the
Indies,” and were “shrewd, intelligent, and courageous.”
The more he saw and the more he reflected, the more convinced he
was that this country was “the most elevated in the world, and the
nearest to the sky.” Where else could this majestic river, that
rushed eagerly to this mighty struggle with the sea, come from, but
from that loftiest peak of the globe, in the midst whereof was the
inexhaustible fountain of the four great rivers of the earth? The faith
or the fanaticism—whichever one may please to call it—of the devout
cosmographer was never for an instant shadowed by a doubt. The human
learning of all time had taught him that the shorter way to India must
be across that western ocean which, he was persuaded, covered only one
third of the globe and separated the western coast of Europe from the
eastern coast of Asia. When it was taken for granted that his first
voyage had proved this geographical theory to be the true one, then he
could only understand that as in each successive voyage he had gone
farther, so he was only getting nearer and nearer to the heart of the
empire of the Great Khan.
But to the aid of human knowledge came a higher faith; he was divinely
led. In writing of this third voyage to Dona Juana de la Torres, a
lady of the Court and a companion to the Queen, he said: “God made me
the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in
the Apocalypse by Saint John, after having spoken of it by the mouth
of Isaiah; and he showed me the spot where to find it.”[453]. The end
of the world he believed was at hand; by which he meant, perhaps, only
the world of heathenism and unbelief. In his letter to the sovereigns
he said that “it was clearly predicted concerning these lands by the
mouth of the prophet Isaiah in many places in Scripture, that from
Spain the holy name of God was to be spread abroad.” Amazing and even
fantastic as his conclusions were when they came from the religious
side of his nature, they were to him irrefragable, because they were so
severely logical. He was the chosen instrument of the divine purpose,
because it was to him that the way had been made straight and plain to
the glorious East, where God had planted in the beginning the earthly
Paradise, in which he had placed man, where man had first sinned, and
where ere long was to break the promised dawn of the new heaven and the
new earth.
The northern continent of the New World was discovered by the Cabots
a year before the southern mainland was reached by Columbus. Possibly
this northern voyage may have suggested to the geographers of England
a new theory, as yet, so far as we know, not thought of in Spain and
Portugal,—that a hemisphere was to be circumnavigated, and a passage
found among thousands of leagues of islands, or else through some great
continent hitherto unknown,—except to a few forgotten Northmen of
five hundred years earlier,—before India could be reached by sailing
westward. In speaking of this voyage long afterward, Sebastian Cabot
said: “I began to saile toward the northwest, not thinking to find
any other land than that of Cathay, and from thence turne toward
India; but after certaine dayes I found that the land ranne towards
the North, which was to mee a great displeasure.”[454] This may have
been the afterthought of his old age, when the belief that the new
Indies were the outlying boundaries of the old was generally discarded.
He had forgotten, as the same narrative shows,—unless the year be a
misprint,—the exact date of that voyage, saying that it “was, as farre
as I remember, in the yeare 1496, in the beginning of Summer.” This
was a year too soon. But if the statement be accepted as literally
true that he was disappointed in finding, not Cathay and India, as he
had hoped, but another land, then not only the honor of the discovery
of the western continent belongs to his father and to him,—or rather
to the father alone, for the son was still a boy,—but the further
distinction of knowing what they had discovered; while Columbus never
awoke from the delusion that he had touched the confines of India.
A discussion of the several interesting questions relating to the
voyages of the Cabots belongs to another chapter;[455] but assuming
here that the voyage of the “Mathew” from Bristol, England, in the
summer of 1497, is beyond controversy, the precedence of the Cabots
over Columbus in the discovery of the continent may be taken for
granted. There is other ample evidence besides his curious letters to
show that the latter was on the coast of South America in the summer
of 1498, just thirteen months and one week after the Cabots made the
_terra primum visa_, whether on the coast of Nova Scotia, Labrador,
or possibly Newfoundland.[456] Not that this detracts in any degree,
however slight, from the great name of Columbus as the discoverer
of the New World. Of him Sebastian Cabot was mindful to say, in
conversation with the Pope’s envoy in Spain,—just quoted from in the
preceding paragraph,—that “when newes were brought that Don Christopher
Colonus, Genoese, had discovered the coasts of India, whereof was
great talke in all the Court of King Henry the 7, who then raigned,
insomuch that all men with great admiration affirmed it to be a thing
more divine than humane to saile by the West into the Easte, where
spices growe, by a map that was never knowen before,—by this fame and
report there increased in my heart a great flame of desire to attempt
some notable thing.” However notable the thing might be, it could be
only secondary to that achievement of Columbus which Cabot looked upon
as “more divine than human;” but whether in the first sight of the
mainland which all hoped to find beyond the islands already visited,
Vespucci did not take precedence both of the Cabots and of Columbus,
has been a disputed question for nearly four hundred years; and it
will probably never be considered as satisfactorily settled, should it
continue in dispute for four hundred years longer.
The question is, whether Vespucci made four voyages to that half of
the world which was ever after to bear his name,[457] and whether
those voyages were really made at the time it is said they were.
The most essential point, however, is that of the date of the first
voyage: for if that which is asserted to be the true date be correct,
the first discoverer of the western continent was neither the Cabots
nor Columbus, but Vespucci; and his name was properly enough bestowed
upon it. “In the year 1497,” says an ancient and authentic Bristol
manuscript,[458] “the 24th June, on St. John’s day, was Newfoundland
found by Bristol men [the Cabots] in a ship called the ‘Mathew.’” On
his third voyage, in 1498, Columbus says: “We saw land [Trinidad] at
noon of Tuesday the 31st of July.” In a letter, written no doubt by
Vespucci, he says: “We sailed from the port of Cadiz on the 10th of
May, 1497;”[459] and after leaving the Canaries, where the four ships
of the expedition remained a few days to take in their final supplies
of wood, water, and provisions, they came, he continues, “at the end
of twenty-seven days, upon a coast which we thought to be that of a
continent.” Of these dates the first two mentioned are unquestionably
authentic. If that last given were equally so, there would be an end of
all controversy upon the subject; for it would prove that Vespucci’s
discovery of the continent preceded that of the Cabots, though only by
a week or two, while it must have been earlier than that of Columbus by
about fourteen months.
It should first of all be noted that the sole authority for a voyage
made by Vespucci in 1497 is Vespucci himself. All contemporary
history, other than his own letter, is absolutely silent in regard
to such a voyage, whether it be history in printed books, or in the
archives of those kingdoms of Europe where the precious documents
touching the earlier expeditions to the New World were deposited.
Santarem, in his _Researches_, goes even farther than this; for he
declares that even the name of Vespucci is not to be found in the
Royal Archives of Portugal, covering the period from 1495 to 1503, and
including more than a hundred thousand documents relating to voyages
of discovery; that he is not mentioned in the Diplomatic Records of
Portugal, which treat of the relations of that kingdom with Spain
and Italy, when one of the duties of ambassadors was to keep their
Governments advised of all new discoveries; and that among the many
valuable manuscripts belonging to the Royal Library at Paris, he,
M. Santarem, sought in vain for any allusion to Vespucci. But these
assertions have little influence over those who do not agree with
Santarem that Vespucci was an impostor. The evidence is overwhelming
that he belonged to some of the expeditions sent out at that period
to the southwest; and if he was so obscure as not to be recognized in
any contemporary notices of those voyages, then it could be maintained
with some plausibility that he might have made an earlier voyage about
which nothing was known. And this would seem the more probable when
it was remembered that the time (1497) of this alleged expedition was
within that interval when “the very tailors,” as Columbus said, might
go, without let or hindrance, in search of riches and renown in the
new-found world.
[Illustration: AUTOGRAPH OF VESPUCIUS, 1508.
[This is the conclusion of a letter of Vespucius, printed and given in
fac-simile in the _Cartas de Indias_.—ED.]]
Nevertheless, the fact of the obscurity of Vespucci at that period
is not without great weight, though Santarem fails in his attempt to
prove too much by it. Columbus believed when, on his second voyage, he
coasted the southern shore of Cuba, that he had touched the continent
of Asia. The extension of that continent he supposed, from indications
given by the natives, and accepted by him as confirming a foregone
conclusion, would be found farther south; and for that reason he took
that course on his third voyage. “The land where the spices grow” was
now the aim of all Spanish energy and enterprise; and it is not likely
that this theory of the Admiral was not well understood among the
merchants and navigators who took an intelligent as well as an intense
interest in all that he had done and in all that he said.
[Illustration: VESPUCIUS.[460]]
Is it probable, then, that nobody should know of the sailing of four
ships from Cadiz for farther and more important discoveries in the
direction pointed out by Columbus? Or, if their departure was secret,
can there be a rational doubt that the return, with intelligence so
important and generally interesting, would have been talked about
in all the ports of Spain, and the man who brought it have become
instantly famous?
[Illustration: VESPUCIUS.
[A sketch of an old engraving as given in the _Allgem. geog.
Ephemeriden_ (Weimar, 1807), vol. xxiii. There are other engravings of
it in Jules Verne’s _Découverte de la terre_, and elsewhere.—ED.]]
But as no account of the voyage appeared till years afterward, and
then in a letter from Vespucci himself; and as, meanwhile, for most of
those years the absence of his name from contemporary records shows
that no celebrity whatever was attached to it,—the logical conclusion
is, not only that the voyage was unknown, but that it was unknown
because it was never made. Moreover, if it was ever made it could not
have been unknown, if we may trust Vespucci’s own statement. For in his
letter—not written till 1504, and not published in full till 1507—he
said that this expedition was sent out by order of King Ferdinand; that
he, Vespucci, went upon it by royal command; and that after his return
he made a report of it to the King. The expedition, therefore, was
clearly not one of those which, in the interval between the summers
of 1495 and 1497, so often referred to, escaped all public record; and
as there cannot be found any recognition of such an enterprise at that
date either in contemporaneous history or State documents, what other
conclusion can be accepted as rational and without prejudice, than that
no such voyage so commanded was made at that time?
[Illustration: VESPUCIUS.
[A fac-simile of the engraving in _Montanus_, copied in _Ogilby_, p.
60.—ED.]]
There seems to be no escape from this evidence, though it is so purely
negative and circumstantial. But Humboldt, relying upon the researches
of the Spanish historian Muñoz, and upon those gathered by Navarrete in
his _Coleccion de los viages y descubrimientos_, presents the proof of
an _alibi_ for Vespucci. As has been already said on a previous page,
the fact is unquestioned that Vespucci, who had been a resident of
Spain for some time, became in 1495 a member of the commercial house
of Juanoto Berardi, at Seville, and that in January of the next year,
as the public accounts show, he was paid a sum of money relative to a
contract with Government which Berardi did not live to complete. The
presumption is that he would not soon absent himself from his post of
duty, where new and onerous responsibilities had been imposed upon
him by the recent death of the senior partner of the house with which
he was connected. But at any rate he is found there in the spring of
1497, Muñoz having ascertained that fact from the official records of
expenses incurred in fitting out the ships for western expeditions,
still preserved at Seville. Those records show that from the middle of
April, 1497, to the end of May, 1498, Vespucci was busily engaged at
Seville and San Lucar in the equipment of the fleet with which Columbus
sailed on his third voyage. The _alibi_, therefore, is complete.
Vespucci could not have been absent from Spain from May, 1497, to
October, 1498,—the period of his alleged first voyage.
All this seems incontrovertible, and should be accepted as conclusive
till fresh researches among the archives of that age shall show,
if that be possible, that those hitherto made have been either
misunderstood or are incomplete. Assuming the negative to be proved,
then, as to the alleged date of Vespucci’s first voyage, the positive
evidence, on the other hand, is ample and unquestioned, that Columbus
sailed from San Lucar on his third voyage on the 30th of May, 1498, and
two months later reached the western continent about the Gulf of Paria.
Was Vespucci then a charlatan? Was he guilty of acts so base as a
falsification of dates, and narratives of pretended voyages, that he
might secure for himself the fame that belonged to another,—that other,
moreover, being his friend? There are reasons for believing this to be
quite true of him; and other reasons for not believing it at all. There
is not, to begin with, a scrap of original manuscript of his bearing
on this point known to exist; it is not even positively known in what
tongue his letters were written; and anything, therefore, like absolute
proof as to what he said he did or did not do, is clearly impossible.
The case has to be tried upon circumstantial evidence and as one of
moral probabilities; and the verdict must needs differ according to the
varying intelligence and disposition of different juries.
He made, or he claimed to have made,—assuming the letters attributed
to him to be his,—four voyages, of each of which he wrote a narrative.
According to the dates given in these letters, he twice sailed from
Spain by order of Ferdinand,—in May, 1497, and in May, 1499; and
twice from Portugal, in the service of King Emanuel,—in May, 1501,
and in May, 1503. He was absent, as we learn from the same letters,
about seventeen months on the first voyage, about sixteen each on the
second and third, and on the fourth eleven months. If he went to sea,
then, for the first time in May, 1497, and the last voyage ended, as
the narrative says, in June, 1504, the whole period of his seafaring
life was eighty-four months, of which sixty were passed at sea, and
twenty-four, at reasonable intervals, on shore. As the dates of
departure and of return are carefully given, obviously the period from
May, 1497, to June, 1504, must be allowed for the four expeditions. But
here we come upon an insurmountable obstacle. If to the first voyage
of 1497 the wrong date was given,—if, that is, the actual first voyage
was that of 1499, which Vespucci calls his second,—then he could not
have gone upon four expeditions. From May, 1499, to June, 1504, is a
period of sixty months; and as the aggregate length he gives to the
assumed four voyages is sixty months, they could not have been made in
that time, as that would have compelled him to be at sea the whole five
years, with no interval of return to Spain or Portugal to refit,—which
is manifestly absurd.
The solution of the difficulty relied upon by Humboldt and others
seems, therefore, insufficient; it is not explained by assuming that
the date 1497 in the narrative of the first voyage was the careless
blunder of the translator, copyist, or printer of Vespucci’s original
letter. It is not an error if there were four voyages; for as the date
of the last one is undisputed, the date of 1497 for the first one must
remain to give time enough for the whole. But that there were four
voyages does not depend solely upon the date given to the first one.
That there were four—“quatuor navigationes”—is asserted repeatedly by
Vespucci in the different letters. In the relation of the first one,
wherein is given this troublesome date which has so vexed the souls of
scholars, he says at some length that as he had seen on these “twice
two” voyages so many strange things, differing so much from the manners
and customs of his own country, he had written a little book, not yet
published, to be called “Four Expeditions, or Four Voyages,” in which
he had related, to the best of his ability, about all he had seen.[461]
If, then, the date 1497 is to be explained away as the result of
carelessness or accident,—even admitting that such an explanation
would explain,—what is to be done with this passage? It cannot, like
a single numeral—a 7 for a 9—be attributed to chance; and it becomes
necessary, therefore, to regard it as an interpolation contrived to
sustain a clumsy falsification of date.
It has also been conjectured that two of the letters have been
misapprehended; that Vespucci meant one as only a continuation of
the other in a description of a single voyage, or if intended as
two letters, they were meant to describe the same voyage. The early
editors, it has been suggested, supposing that each letter described a
separate voyage, forged or changed the dates in accordance with that
supposition. If there were no other objection to this theory, it is
untenable if what has just been said be true. The duration of each
voyage, the aggregate length of the whole, and the distinct and careful
assertion that there were four of them, require that there should be
one prior to that which Vespucci calls his second.
All this leads, according to our present knowledge of the facts,
inevitably to this conclusion,—whether Vespucci himself wrote, or
others wrote for him, these letters, their very consistency of dates
and of circumstantial assertion show them to have been deliberately
composed to establish a falsehood. For the researches of Muñoz and of
Navarrete, as is said above, prove that Vespucci could not have sailed
from Spain on his first voyage on the 10th or 20th of May, 1497; for
from the middle of April of that year to the end of May, 1498, he was
busily employed at Seville and San Lucar in fitting out the fleet for
the third expedition of Columbus.
There is other evidence, negative indeed, but hardly less conclusive,
that this assumed voyage of 1497 was never made. In 1512 Don Diego
Columbus brought an action against the Crown of Spain to recover,
as the heir of his father, Christopher Columbus, the government and
a portion of the revenues of certain provinces on the continent of
America. The defence was that those countries were not discovered by
Columbus, and the claim, therefore, was not valid. It is not to be
supposed that the Crown was negligent in the search for testimony to
sustain its own cause, for nearly a hundred witnesses were examined.
But no evidence was offered to prove that Vespucci—whose nephew
was present at the trial—visited in 1497 the Terra Firma which the
plaintiff maintained his father discovered in 1498. On the other hand,
Alonzo de Ojeda, an eminent navigator, declared that he was sent on an
expedition in 1499 to the coast of Paria next after it was discovered
by the Admiral (Columbus); and that “in this voyage which this said
witness made, he took with him Juan de la Cosa and Morigo Vespuche
[Amerigo Vespucci] and other pilots.”[462] When asked how he knew that
Columbus had made the discovery at the time named, his reply was that
he knew it because the Bishop Fonseca had supplied him with that map
which the Admiral had sent home in his letter to the King and Queen.
The act of the Bishop was a dishonorable one, and intended as an injury
to Columbus; and to this purpose Ojeda further lent himself by stopping
at Hispaniola on the return from his voyage, and by exciting there a
revolt against the authority of the Admiral in that island. Perhaps
the bitter animosity of those years had been buried in the grave of
the great navigator, together with the chains which had hung always in
his chamber as a memento of the royal ingratitude; but even in that
case it is not likely that Ojeda would have lost such an opportunity to
justify, in some degree, his own conduct by declaring, if he knew it to
be so, that Columbus was not the first discoverer of the continent. It
is of course possible, but it is certainly not probable, that he should
not have heard from Vespucci that this was his second visit to the Gulf
of Paria, if that were the fact, and that his first visit was a year
before that of Columbus, whose chart Ojeda was using to direct his
course through seas with which Vespucci was familiar. This reasonable
reflection is dwelt upon by Humboldt, Irving, and others; and it comes
with peculiar force to the careful reader of the letters of Vespucci,
for he was never in the least inclined to hide his light under a bushel.
The originals of the letters, as has already been said, are not, so
far as is known, in existence; it is even uncertain whether they were
written in Latin, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese. Nor has the book
which Vespucci said he had prepared—“The Four Voyages”—ever been found;
but Humboldt believed that the collected narrative first published at
St.-Dié in 1507, in the _Cosmographiæ introductio_ of Hylacomylus,
was made up of extracts from that book. This St.-Dié edition was in
Latin, translated, the editor says, from the French.[463] There is in
the British Museum a rare work of four pages, published also in 1507,
the author of which was Walter Lud. This Lud was the secretary of the
Duke of Lorraine, a canon of the St.-Dié Cathedral, and the founder of
the school or college, where he had set up a printing-press on which
was printed the _Cosmographiæ introductio_. From this little book it
is learned that the Vespucci letters were sent from Portugal to the
Duke of Lorraine in French, and that they were translated into Latin by
another canon of the St.-Dié Cathedral, one Jean Basin de Sandacourt,
at the request of Lud.[464]
Vespucci’s last two voyages were made, so his letters assert, in
the service of the King of Portugal. The narrative of the first of
these—the third of the four voyages—appeared at different times, at
several places, and were addressed to more than one person, prior to
the publication of the St.-Dié edition of all the letters addressed to
René II., the Duke of Lorraine. This fact has added to the confusion
and doubt; for each of these copies sent to different persons was a
translation, presumably from some common original. One copy of them was
addressed to Pietro Soderini, Gonfaloniere of Florence, whom Vespucci
claimed as an old friend and school-fellow under the instruction of
his uncle, Giorgi Antonio Vespucci; another was sent to Lorenzo di
Pier Francesco de’ Medici,—Vespucci’s early employer,—both appearing
prior to that addressed in the collected edition of St.-Dié addressed
to the Duke of Lorraine. Of the earlier editions there was one
published, according to Humboldt, in Latin, in 1504, at Augsburg and
also at Paris; another in German, in 1505, at Strasburg, and in 1506
at Leipsic; and still another in Italian at Vicenza, in the collection
called _Paesi novamente_, simultaneously with the St.-Dié edition
of 1507. These in later years were followed by a number of other
editions. While they agree as to general statement, they differ in many
particulars, and especially in regard to dates. These, however, are
often mere typographical blunders or errors of copyists, not unusual
at that era, and always fruitful of controversy. But upon one point,
it is to be observed, there is no difference among them; the voyage of
1501—the first from Portugal—is always the third of the four voyages
of Vespucci. This disposes, as Humboldt points out, of the charge that
Vespucci waited till after the death of Columbus, in 1506, before he
ventured to assert publicly that he had made two voyages by order of
the King of Spain prior to entering the service of the King of Portugal.
To induce him to leave Spain and come to Portugal, Vespucci says, in
the letter addressed to Pietro Soderini, that the King sent to him one
Giuliano Bartholomeo del Giocondo, then a resident of Lisbon. Jocundus
(the latinized pseudonym of Giocondo) is named as the translator of
the Augsburg edition of 1504, addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici. This
Jocundus, Humboldt thinks, was Giuliano Giocondo. But Major, in his
_Henry the Navigator_, says that the translation was made, not by
Giuliano Giocondo, but by his kinsman Giovanni Giocondo, of Verona. His
authority for this statement is apparently Walter Lud’s _Speculum_.
Varnhagen thinks it possible that the work may have been done by one
Mathias Ringman,—of whom more presently. Varnhagen says also, in
another place, that the translator of the Italian version—published in
the _Paesi novamente_ at Vicenza in 1507—unwittingly betrayed that he
lied (_son mensonge_) when he said that he followed a Spanish copy; for
while he failed to comprehend the use of the word Jocundus, he showed
that it was before him in the Latin copy, as he rendered _Jocundus
interpres_—Jocundus the translator—as _el iocondo interprete_, the
agreeable translator. This is only one example of the confusion in
which the subject is involved.
It was due, however, to the _Cosmographiæ introductio_ of St.-Dié, in
which the letters appeared as a sort of appendix, that the name of
America, from Amerigo, was given to the western hemisphere. But how
it happened that the _Quatuor navigationes_ should have been first
published in that little town in the Vosges mountains; and what the
relation was between Vespucci and René II., the Duke of Lorraine,—are
among the perplexing questions in regard to the letters that have been
discussed at great length. Major finds in the fact, or assumed fact,
that Fra Giovanno Giocondo was the translator of the narrative of
the third voyage, the first published, in 1504, an important link in
the chain of evidence by which he explains the St.-Dié puzzle. This
Giocondo was about that time at Paris as the architect of the bridge
of Notre Dame. A young student, Mathias Ringman, from Alsace, was also
there at that period; and Major supposes he may have become acquainted
with Giocondo, who inspired him with great admiration for Vespucci. It
is certain, at any rate, that Ringman, whose literary pseudonym was
Philesius Vogesina,—that is, Philesius of the Vosges,—on his return to
his native province edited the Strasburg edition (1505) of Giocondo’s
translation, appending to it some verses written by himself in praise
of Vespucci and his achievements.
In the rare book already referred to, the _Speculum_ of Walter Lud, it
is said of this Strasburg edition that “the booksellers carry about
a certain epigram of our Philesius in a little book of Vespucci’s
translated from Italian into Latin by Giocondo, of Verona, the
architect of Venice.” Doubtless Ringman is here spoken of as “our
Philesius,” because he had become identified with Lud’s college, where
he was the professor of Latin. It seems almost certain, therefore,
that the interest at St.-Dié in Vespucci’s voyages was inspired by
Ringman, whether his enthusiasm was first aroused by his friendship
with Giocondo at Paris, or whether, as Varnhagen supposes, it was the
result of a visit or two to Italy. The latter question is not of much
moment, except as a speculation; and certainly it is not a straining of
probabilities to doubt if Ringman would have taken for his Strasburg
edition of 1505 the Giocondo translation, as Lud says he did, if he had
himself translated, as Varnhagen supposes, the Augsburg edition of 1504.
Lud also asserts in the _Speculum_ that the French copy of the _Quatuor
navigationes_ which was used at St.-Dié came from Portugal. Major
supposes that Ringman’s enthusiasm may have led to correspondence with
Vespucci, who was in Portugal till 1505, and that he caused his letters
to be put into French and sent to Ringman at his request. The narrative
of the third voyage in its several editions must have already given
some renown to Vespucci. Here were other narratives of other voyages
by the same navigator. The clever and enterprising young professors,
eager for the dissemination of knowledge, and not unmindful, possibly,
of the credit of their college, brought out the letters as a part of
the _Cosmographiæ introductio_ by Hylacomylus—Martin Waldzeemüller—the
teacher of geography, and the proof-reader to their new press. Their
prince, René II., was known as a patron of learning; and it is more
likely that they should have prefixed his name to the letters than that
Vespucci should have done so. Their zeal undoubtedly was greater than
their knowledge; for had they known more of the discoveries of the
previous fifteen years they would have hesitated to give to the new
continent the name of one who would be thereby raised thenceforth from
comparative, though honorable, obscurity to dishonorable distinction.
That Vespucci himself, however, was responsible for this there is no
positive evidence; and were it not for the difficulty of explaining
his constant insistence of the completion of four voyages, it might be
possible to find some plausible explanation of the confusion of the
St.-Dié book.
In that book are these words: “And the fourth part of the world
having been discovered by Americus, it may be called Amerige; that
is, the land of Americus or America.”[465] And again: “Now truly,
as these regions are more widely explored, and another fourth part
is discovered, by Americus Vesputius, as may be learned from the
following letters, I see no reason why it should not be justly called
Amerigen,—that is, the land of Americus, or America, from Americus, its
discoverer, a man of acute intellect; inasmuch as both Europe and Asia
have chosen their names from the feminine form.”[466]
It was discovered, less than half a century ago, through the diligent
researches of Humboldt, that this professor of geography at St.-Dié,
Hylacomylus, was thus the inventor, so to speak, of this word America.
That it came at last to be received as the designation of the western
continent was due, perhaps, very much to the absence of any suggestion
of any other distinctive name that seemed appropriate and was generally
acceptable. Rare as the little work, the _Cosmographiæ introductio_,
now is, it was probably well known at the time of the publication
of its several editions; as the central position of St.-Dié—between
France, Germany, and Italy—gave to the book, as Humboldt thought,
a wide circulation, impressing the word America upon the learned
world. The name, however, came very slowly into use, appearing only
occasionally in some book, till in 1522 it gained a more permanent
place on a mappemonde in the _Geographia_ of Ptolemy. From that time
it appeared frequently upon other maps, and by the middle of the
century became generally recognized outside of Spain, at least, as the
established continental name. But the effect of its suggestion was
more immediate upon the fame of Vespucci. While the learned understood
that the great captain of that time was Christopher Columbus, the name
of Amerigo was often united with his as deserving of at least the
second place, and sometimes even of the first. The celebrity which
Hylacomylus bestowed upon him was accepted for performance by those
who were ignorant of the exact truth; and those who knew better did not
give themselves the trouble to correct the error.
In each of Vespucci’s voyages he probably held a subordinate position.
His place may sometimes have been that of a pilot,[467] or as the
commander of a single ship, or attached to the fleet, as Herrera[468]
says he was in Ojeda’s expedition (1499), “as merchant, being skilful
in cosmography and navigation.” Vespucci himself does not in so many
words assert that he was in command of the expeditions upon which he
sailed, while he occasionally alludes, though usually in terms of
contempt, to those whose authority was above his own. Once he speaks of
Columbus, and then almost parenthetically, as the discoverer merely of
the Island of Hispaniola; but of other of his achievements, or of those
of other eminent navigators, he has nothing to say. In reply to such
criticisms of his letters it has been urged on his behalf that they
were written for intimate friends, as familiar narratives of personal
experiences, and not meant to be, in any broad sense, historical. But
the deception was as absolute as if it had been deliberately contrived;
and, whether intentional or not, was never by act or word corrected,
though Vespucci lived for five years after the appearance of the
letters from the St.-Dié press.
But whatever can be or may be said in extenuation of Vespucci, or
however strong the reasons for supposing that for whatever was
reprehensible in the matter he was innocent and the St.-Dié professors
alone responsible, there nevertheless remains the one thing unexplained
and inexplicable,—his own repeated assertion that he made four voyages.
Humboldt supposes that the narrative of the first, so called, of these
four voyages, beginning in May, 1497, was made up of that on which
Vespucci certainly sailed with Ojeda, starting in May, 1499. The
points of resemblance are so many and so striking as to seem not only
conclusive, but to preclude any other theory. If this be true, then it
follows that the narrative of the voyage of 1497 was simply a forgery,
whosoever was responsible for it; and if a forgery, then Vespucci was
not the discoverer of the western continent, and an historical renown
was given to his name to which he was not entitled.
The second of the assumed four voyages Humboldt supposes to be the
first voyage of Vincente Yañez Pinzon,—hesitating, however, between
that and the voyage of Diego de Lepe: the former sailing with four
ships in December, 1499, and returning in September, 1500; the latter
with two ships, in January, 1500, and returning in June. Vespucci says
that he had two ships; that he sailed in May, 1499, and returned in
June or September of the next year. It is of the first voyage of 1497
that he says he had four ships. As on that assumed voyage there are
many incidents identical with those related of Ojeda’s voyage of 1499,
so here there are strong points of resemblance between Vespucci’s
supposed second voyage and that of Pinzon. In both cases, however,
there are irreconcilable differences, which Humboldt does not attempt
to disguise; while at the same time they indicate either dishonesty
on the part of Vespucci in his letters, or that those letters were
tampered with by others, either ignorantly or with dishonest intent, to
which Vespucci afterward tacitly assented.
It would be hypercritical to insist upon a strict adherence to the
dates of the several voyages, and then to decide that the voyages
were impossible because the dates are irreconcilable. The figures are
sometimes obviously mere blunders; as, for example, the assertion in
the St.-Dié edition that the second voyage was begun in May, 1489,
when it had been already said that the first voyage was made in 1497.
But there are statements of facts, nevertheless, which it is necessary
to reconcile with dates; and when this is impossible, a doubt of
truthfulness is so far justifiable. Thus in the relation of the second
voyage Vespucci asserts, or is made to assert, that on the 23d of
August, 1499, he saw while at sea a conjunction of Mars and the Moon.
That phenomenon did occur at that time, as Humboldt learned from the
Ephemeris; and if it was observed by Vespucci at sea, that could not
have been upon a voyage with Pinzon, who did not sail till (December,
1499) four months after the conjunction of the planets. But here,
moreover, arises another difficulty: Vespucci’s second voyage, in which
he observed this conjunction, could not have been made with Ojeda,
and must have been made with Pinzon, if on other points the narrative
be accepted; for it was upon that voyage that Vespucci says he sailed
several degrees south of the equinoctial line to the mouth of the
Amazon,—which Pinzon did do, and Ojeda did not. These and other similar
discrepancies have led naturally to the suspicion that the incidents of
more than one expedition were used, with more or less discrimination,
but with little regard to chronology, for the composition of a
plausible narrative of two voyages made in the service of Spain. One
blunder, detected by Navarrete in this so-called second voyage, it is
quite incredible that Vespucci could have committed; for according
to the course pursued and the distance sailed, his ships would have
been navigated over nearly three hundred leagues of dry land into the
interior of the continent. No critical temerity is required to see in
such a blunder the carelessness of a copyist or a compositor.
It was of the first voyage from Lisbon—the third of the _Quatuor
navigationes_—that, as has been already said, a narrative was first
published in a letter addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici. This was
illustrated with diagrams of some of the constellations of the southern
hemisphere; and the repute it gave to the writer led the way to his
subsequent fame. What Vespucci’s position was in the expedition is
not known; but that it was still a subordinate one is evident from
his own words, as he speaks of a commander, though only to find fault
with him, and without giving his name. The object of the expedition
was to discover the western passage to the Spice Islands of the East
(Melcha, Melacca, Malaccha, according to the varying texts of different
editions of the letter); and though the passage was not found, the
voyage was, like Cabot’s, one of the boldest and most important of
the age. But it is also, of all Vespucci’s voyages, real or assumed,
that which has been most disputed. Navarrete, however, after a careful
examination of all the evidence that touches the question, comes to the
conclusion that such an expedition, on which Vespucci may have gone in
some subordinate position, was really sent out in 1501 by the King of
Portugal; and Humboldt concurs in this opinion.
The Terra de Vera Cruz, or Brazil, as it was afterward named, was
visited successively for the first time, from January to April, 1500,
by Pinzon, De Lepe, De Mendoza, and Cabral. But the expedition to which
Vespucci was attached explored the coast from the fifth parallel of
southern latitude, three degrees north of Cape St. Augustin,—first
discovered and so named by Pinzon,—as far south, perhaps, as about the
thirty-eighth parallel of latitude. They had sailed along the coast
for about seven hundred leagues; and so beautiful was the country, so
luxuriant its vegetation, so salubrious its climate, where men did not
die till they were a hundred and fifty years old, that Vespucci was
persuaded—as Columbus, only three years before, had said of the region
drained by the Orinoco—that the earthly Paradise was not far off. Gold,
the natives said, was abundant in the interior; but as the visitors
found none, it was determined at last to continue the voyage in another
direction, leaving behind them this coast, of what seemed to Vespucci
a continent, along which they had sailed from the middle of August
to the middle of February. Starting now on the 15th of February from
the mainland, they steered southeast, till they reached, on the 3d of
April, the fifty-second degree of latitude. They had sailed through
stormy seas, driven by violent gales, running away from daylight into
nights of fifteen hours in length, and encountering a severity of cold
unknown in Southern Europe, and quite beyond their power of endurance.
A new land at length was seen; but it only needed a few hours of
observation of its dangerous, rocky, and ice-bound coast to satisfy
them that it was a barren, uninhabited, and uninhabitable region.
This, Varnhagen suggests most reasonably, was the Island of Georgia,
rediscovered by Captain Cook nearly three centuries afterward.
The return to Lisbon was in September, 1502. By order of the King,
Vespucci sailed again in May, 1503, from Lisbon on a second voyage,—the
fourth of his _Quatuor navigationes_. The object, as before, was to
find a western passage to the Moluccas; for it was the trade of India,
not new discoveries in the western continent, upon which the mind of
the King was bent. There were six ships in this new expedition; and it
is generally agreed that as Gonzalo Coelho sailed from Lisbon in May,
1503, by order of Emanuel, in command of six ships, Vespucci probably
held a subordinate position in that fleet. He does not name Coelho, but
he refers to a superior officer as an obstinate and presumptuous man,
who by his bad management wrecked the flagship. Vespucci may have been
put in command of two of the ships by the King; with two, at any rate,
he became separated, in the course of the voyage, from his commodore,
and with them returned to Lisbon in June of the next year. The rest of
the fleet Vespucci reported as lost through the pride and folly of
the commander; and it was thus, he said, that God punished arrogance.
But Vespucci either misunderstood the divine will or misjudged his
commander, for the other ships soon after returned in safety.
The southernmost point reached by him on this voyage was the eighteenth
degree of southern latitude. At this point, somewhere about Cape Frio,
he built a fort, and left in it the crew of one of the two vessels
which had been shipwrecked. The precise spot of this settlement is
uncertain; but as it was planted by Vespucci, and as it was the first
colony of Europeans in that part of the New World, there was an evident
and just propriety in bestowing the derivative—America—of his name upon
the country, which at first was known as “The Land of the True Cross,”
and afterward as “Brazil.” The name of Brazil was retained when the
wider application—America—was given to the whole continent.
Soon after his return from this, the last of the _Navigationes_ of
which he himself, so far as is known, gave any account, he went
back, in 1505, to Spain. It is conjectured that he made other
voyages; but whether he did or did not, no absolute evidence has
ever been found.[469] We know almost nothing of him up to that time
except what is told by himself. When he ceased writing of his own
exploits, then also the exploits ceased so far as can be learned from
contemporary authors, who hitherto also had been silent about him. In
1508 (March 22) Ferdinand of Spain appointed him pilot-major of the
kingdom,[470]—an office of dignity and importance, which probably he
retained till he died (Feb. 22, 1512). His fame was largely posthumous;
but a hemisphere is his monument. If not among the greatest of the
world’s great men, he is among the happiest of those on whom good
fortune has bestowed renown.
[Illustration]
During recent years (1892-3) John Fiske, in his _Discovery of
America_, vol. ii., has reinforced the argument of Varnhagen in favor
of the disputed (1497) voyage of Vespucius; Henry Harrisse, in his
_Discovery of North America_, rejects his own earlier arguments in
its favor; Clements R. Markham, in _Christopher Columbus_, totally
discredits the theory, and Justin Winsor, in his _Christopher
Columbus_, has considered the proposition not proven.
CRITICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON VESPUCIUS AND THE NAMING OF
AMERICA.
BY THE EDITOR.
WHILE Vespucius never once clearly affirms that he discovered the main,
such an inference may be drawn from what he says. Peter Martyr gives
no date at all for the voyage of Pinzon and Solis to the Honduras
coast, which was later claimed by Oviedo and Gomara to have preceded
that of Columbus to the main. Navarrete has pointed out the varied
inconsistencies of the Vespucius narrative,[471] as well as the changes
of the dates of the setting out and the return, as given in the various
editions.[472] All of them give a period of twenty-nine months for a
voyage which Vespucius says only took eighteen,—a difficulty Canovai
and others have tried to get over by changing the date of return to
1498; and some such change was necessary to enable Vespucius to be
in Spain to start again with Ojeda in May, 1499. Humboldt further
instances a great variety of obvious typographical errors in the
publications of that day,—as, for instance, where Oviedo says Columbus
made his first voyage in 1491.[473] But, as shown in the preceding
narrative, an allowance for errors of the press is not sufficient. In
regard to the proof of an _alibi_ which Humboldt brought forward from
documents said to have been collected by Muñoz from the archives of the
Casa de la Contratacion, it is unfortunate that Muñoz himself did not
complete that part of his work which was to pertain to Vespucius, and
that the documents as he collated them have not been published. In the
absence of such textual demonstration, the inference which Humboldt
drew from Navarrete’s representations of those documents has been
denied by Varnhagen; and H. H. Bancroft in his _Central America_ (i.
99, 102, 106) does not deem the proof complete.[474]
Vespucius’ own story for what he calls his second voyage (1499) is
that he sailed from Cadiz shortly after the middle of May, 1499. The
subsequent dates of his being on the coast are conflicting; but it
would appear that he reached Spain on his return in June or September,
1500. We have, of course, his narrative of this voyage in the
collective letter to Soderini;[475] but there is also an independent
narrative, published by Bandini (p. 64) in 1745, said to have been
written July 18, 1500, and printed from a manuscript preserved in the
Riccardiana at Florence.[476] The testimony of Ojeda that Vespucius
was his companion in the voyage of 1499-1500 seems to need the
qualification that he was with him for a part, and not for the whole,
of the voyage; and it has been advanced that Vespucius left Ojeda
at Hispaniola, and, returning to Spain, sailed again with Pinzon in
December, 1499,—thus attempting to account for the combination of
events which seem to connect Vespucius with the voyages of both these
navigators.
It is noteworthy that Oviedo, who sought to interpret Peter Martyr as
showing that Solis and Pinzon had preceded Columbus to the main, makes
no mention of Vespucius. There is no mention of him in what Beneventano
furnished to the Ptolemy of 1508. Castanheda does not allude to him,
nor does Barreiros in his _De Ophira regione_ (Coimbra, 1560), nor
Galvano in his _Descobrimientos_, nor Pedro Magalhaes de Gandavo in his
account of Santa Cruz (1576).[477]
But it was not all forgetfulness as time went on. The currency to
his fame which had been given by the _De orbe antarctica_, by the
_Paesi novamente_, by the _Cosmographiæ introductio_, as well as by
the _Mundus novus_ and the publications which reflected these, was
helped on in 1510 by the Roman archæologist Francesco Albertini in his
_Opusculum de mirabilibus Urbis Romæ_, who finds Florence, and not
Genoa, to have sent forth the discoverer of the New World.[478]
Two years later (1512) an edition of Pomponius Mela which Cocleus
edited, probably at Nuremberg, contained, in a marginal note to a
passage on the “Zona incognita,” the following words: “Verus Americus
Vesputius iam nostro seculo | novū illū mundū invenissefert Portugalie
Castilieq. regū navibus,” etc. Pighius in 1520 had spoken of the
magnitude of the region discovered by Vespucius, which had gained it
the appellation of a new world.[479] The references in Glareanus,
Apian, Phrysius, and Münster show familiarity with his fame by the
leading cosmographical writers of the time. Natale Conti, in his
_Universæ historiæ sui temporis libri XXX_ (1545-1581), brought
him within the range of his memory.[480] In 1590 Myritius, in his
_Opusculum geographicum_, the last dying flicker, as it was, of a
belief in the Asian connection of the New World,[481] repeats the
oft-told story,—“De Brasilia, terrâ ignis, de meridionali parte Africæ
ab Alberico Vesputio inventa.”
In the next century the story is still kept up by the Florentine,
Francesco Bocchi, in his _Libri duo elogiorum_ (1607),[482] and by
another Florentine, Raffael Gualterotti, in a poem, _L’ America_
(1611),[483]—not to name many others.[484]
But all this fame was not unclouded, and it failed of reflection
in some quarters at least. The contemporary Portuguese pilots and
cosmographers give no record of Vespucius’ eminence as a nautical
geometrician. The Portuguese annalist Damião de Goes makes no mention
of him. Neither Peter Martyr nor Benzoni allows him to have preceded
Columbus. Sebastian Cabot, as early as 1515, questioned if any faith
could be placed in the voyage of 1497 “which Americus says he made.”
It is well known that Las Casas more than intimated the chance of his
being an impostor; nor do we deduce from the way that his countrymen,
Guicciardini[485] and Segni, speak of him, that their faith in the
prior claim in his behalf was stable.
An important contestant appeared in Herrera in 1601,[486] who openly
charged Vespucius with falsifying his dates and changing the date of
1499 to 1497; Herrera probably followed Las Casas’ manuscripts which
he had.[487] The allegation fell in with the prevalent indignation
that somebody, rather than a blind fortune, had deprived Columbus of
the naming of the New World; and Herrera helped this belief by stating
positively that the voyage of Pinzon and Solis, which had been depended
upon to antedate Columbus, had taken place as late as 1506.
In the last century Angelo Maria Bandini attempted to stay this tide
of reproach in the _Vita e lettere di Amerigo Vespucci, gentiluomo
fiorentino_, which was printed at Florence in 1745.[488] It was too
manifestly an unbounded panegyric to enlist the sympathy of scholars.
More attention was aroused[489] by an address, with equal adulation,
which Stanislao Canovai delivered to the Academy at Cortona in 1788,
and which was printed at once as _Elogio di Amerigo Vespucci_, and
various times afterward, with more or less change, till it appeared
to revive anew the antagonism of scholars, in 1817.[490] Muñoz had
promised to disclose the impostures of Vespucius, but his uncompleted
task fell to Santarem, who found a sympathizer in Navarrete; and
Santarem’s labored depreciation of Vespucius first appeared in
Navarrete’s _Coleccion_,[491] where Canovai’s arguments are examined at
length, with studied refutations of some points hardly worth the labor.
This paper was later expanded, as explained in another place.
He claims that one hundred thousand documents in the Royal Archives of
Portugal, and the register of maps which belonged to King Emmanuel,
make no mention of Vespucius,[492] and that there is no register of the
letters-patent which Vespucius claimed to have received. Nor is there
any mention in several hundred other contemporary manuscripts preserved
in the great library at Paris, and in other collections, which Santarem
says he has examined.[493]
An admirer of Vespucius, and the most prominent advocate of a belief
in the disputed voyage of 1497, is Francisco Adolpho de Varnhagen,
the Baron de Porto Seguro. As early as 1839, in notes to his _Diario_
of Lopez de Souza, he began a long series of publications in order to
counteract the depreciation of Vespucius by Ayres de Cazal, Navarrete,
and Santarem. In 1854, in his _Historia geral do Brazil_, he had
combated Humboldt’s opinion that it was Pinzon with whom Vespucius had
sailed on his second voyage, and had contended for Ojeda. Varnhagen
not only accepts the statements of the St.-Dié publications regarding
that voyage, but undertakes to track the explorer’s course. In his
_Amerigo Vespucci, son caractère_, etc., he gives a map marking the
various voyages of the Florentine.[494] For the voyage of 1497 he makes
him strike a little south of west from the Canaries; but leaving his
course a blank from the mid-Atlantic, he resumes it at Cape Gracias a
Dios on the point of Honduras,[495] and follows it by the coast thence
to the Chesapeake, when he passes by Bermuda,[496] and reaches Seville.
In this he departs from all previous theories of the landfall, which
had placed the contact on the coast of Paria. He takes a view of the
Ruysch map[497] of 1508 different from that of any other commentator,
in holding the smaller land terminated with a scroll to be not Cuba,
but a part of the main westerly, visited by Vespucius in this 1497
voyage; and recently Harrisse, in his _Cortereal_,[498] argues that
the descriptions of Vespucius in this disputed voyage correspond more
nearly with the Cantino map[499] than with any other. Harrisse also
asks if Waldseemüller did not have such a map as Cantino’s before him;
and if the map of Vespucius, which Peter Martyr says Fonseca had, may
not have been the same?
Varnhagen, as might be expected in such an advocate, turns every
undated incident in Vespucius’ favor if he can. He believes that the
white-bearded men who the natives said preceded the Spaniards were
Vespucius and his companions. A letter of Vianello, dated Dec. 28,
1506, which Humboldt quotes as mentioning an early voyage in which
La Cosa took part, but hesitates to assign to any particular year,
Varnhagen eagerly makes applicable to the voyage of 1497.[500] The
records of the Casa de la Contratacion which seem to be an impediment
to a belief in the voyage, he makes to have reference, not to the
ships of Columbus, but to those of Vespucius’ own command. Varnhagen’s
efforts to elucidate the career of Vespucius have been eager, if not in
all respects conclusive.[501]
* * * * *
We get upon much firmer ground when we come to the consideration of the
voyage of 1501,—the first for Portugal, and the third of Vespucius’
so-called four voyages. It seems clear that this voyage was ordered
by the Portuguese Government to follow up the chance discovery of the
Brazil coast by Cabral in 1500, of which that navigator had sent word
back by a messenger vessel. When the new exploring fleet sailed is
a matter of uncertainty, for the accounts differ,—the Dutch edition
of the account putting it as early as May 1, 1501, while one account
places it as late as June 10.[502] When the fleet reached the Cape
de Verde Islands, it found there Cabral’s vessels on the return
voyage; and what Vespucius here learned from Cabral he embodied in a
letter, dated June 4, 1501, which is printed by Baldelli in his _Il
Milione di Marco Polo_, from a manuscript preserved in the Riccardiana
Collection.[503] Some time in August—for the exact day is in dispute—he
struck the coast of South America, and coursed southward,—returning to
Lisbon Sept. 7, 1502.[504]
Vespucius now wrote an account of it, addressed to Lorenzo Piero
Francesco de Medici,[505] in which he proposed a designation of the new
regions, “novum mundum appellare licet.” Such is the Latin phraseology,
for the original Italian text is lost.[506] Within the next two years
numerous issues of Giocondo’s Latin text were printed, only two of
which are dated,—one at Augsburg in 1504, the other at Strasburg in
1505; and, with a few exceptions, they all, by their published title,
gave currency to the designation of _Mundus novus_.
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