For three centuries, the world has regarded it as an historical fact that

Christopher Columbus, after enduring many wrongs at the hands of ungrateful

Spain, had the unspeakable mortification of seeing a usurper, screened

behind public injustice, wrest from him not only the honor of bestowing his

name on the world he had discovered, but the reward of glory, and the

supreme consolation of his last days. Fortunately this belief is erroneous.

Neither was Americus Vespucius a despoiler, nor was Columbus the victim of

so poignant an affront. It is true that the great navigator became after

death the subject of shameful misapprehensions; but his countrymen should

be held as free from the responsibility of this injustice as Columbus was

free from suspicion or presentiment of coming evil. The facts are fully

explained by the illustrious Prussian _savant_, who has consecrated

his glorious career in great part to the study of the New World. [Footnote

187]

[Footnote 187: M. Alexander Von Humboldt, Critical Examination of the

History and Geography of the New World. Vols. iii. and iv. are entirely

devoted to an examination of this problem. We merely offer here an

abstract of this work, which is little known, and, while exceedingly

interesting, demands a very attentive perusal. See also Washington

Irving, History of Christopher Columbus, vol. iv. app. 9, Americus

Vespucius.]

Americus or Alberic Vespucius, (Amerigo Vespucci,) born at Florence, March

9th, 1451, of an important family, was educated by his uncle, Giorgio

Antonio Vespucci, a Dominican monk, and one of the honorable personages

connected with the _Renaissance_. His fellow-student was René de

Vaudémont, who, later in life, after gloriously defending his duchy of

Lorraine against Charles the Bold, exercised in peace a noble patronage of

science and letters.

Americus, when about forty years of age, left Italy for Spain, and entered

the flourishing commercial house founded at Seville by his countrymen the

Berardi. At this period a large number of Italians established themselves

in Spain, in Portugal, and even in England. Some became promoters of the

commerce fed by Portuguese discoveries, (the Marchioni at Lisbon;) others

(Cadomosto, the Corte reali) traced out a route along the African coast or

explored the icy barrier that guards the north-west passage; while others

again, (Christopher Columbus, John and Sebastian Cabot,) crossed the

Atlantic ocean, bringing back a wondrous discovery. This was one of the

glories of Italy, so rich in all glory during the fifteenth century.

At first a clerk, and in 1496 the general accountant of the Berardi,

Americus Vespucius listened with passionate interest to narrations uttered

by the lips of Christopher Columbus himself. He studied astronomy and the

science of navigation, and made four voyages; the first two under

protection of the Spanish flag, the last two under that of Portugal.

He naturally drew up an account of these expeditions. Like Columbus he

related his foreign experiences to friends and patrons; first, in three

successive letters, describing his first three voyages, written to the

Florentine, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici; and later, after his

fourth expedition, in a single narrative, containing a _résumé_ of all

his travels, addressed simultaneously, but not in the same form, to another

countryman, the gonfalonniere Piero Soderini, and to the Duke of Lorraine,

René II. This last was similar in tenor to a narrative sent by him a short

time before to Ferdinand the Catholic.

{612}

These four voyages, so soon made famous, are extracts, varied by Vespucius

according to the correspondents for whom they were destined. He drew them

from a complete and detailed account, written according "to the weakness of

his puny talent," [Footnote 188] as his overstrained modesty expresses it;

a work executed with assiduous care, "in order that coming generations

might remember him," but which he never published. It has not yet been

brought to light.

[Footnote 188: "Juxta ingenioli mel tenuitatem." Crit. Exam, vol. iv.

p. 170, n. 1.]

It is, then, only by those of his printed letters that have come down to

us--and they are not all preserved--that we know the dates and

circumstances of his voyages.

In the first voyage, which took place between May 20th, 1497, and October

15th, 1499, he recognized the coasts of Surinam and of Paria, at the mouth

of the Orinoco. In the second, dated from May 6th, 1499, to September 8th,

1500, he crossed the equator and saw Cape St. Augustine off Brazil; and

from there sailed north to Paria and Hispaniola. The dates of these two

expeditions contradict each other; for, according to them, his second

voyage must have begun five months before the first ended. Moreover, the

date 1497 for the beginning of the first voyage is inadmissible. The

registers of the Spanish administration (La Casa de Contratacion at

Seville) prove that, from April, 1497, to May, 1498, Americus Vespucius was

detained at Seville and San Lucar, occupied with preparations for the third

voyage of Christopher Columbus. [Footnote 189]

[Footnote 189: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. pp. 267, 268. This third voyage

took place from May 30th. 1498, to November 25th, 1500.]

For this reason the Florentine has been accused of fabricating this

pretended voyage by disguising a few incidents drawn from the second; and

of having antedated his departure from Spain, in order at one stroke to

earn the credit of first touching terra firma at Paria, and deprive

Christopher Columbus of that honor. We shall discuss this question later.

It is a singular fact that, without attributing to himself any share in the

command, and even while distinctly stating that he was there under orders

"to aid in making discoveries," [Footnote 190] he does not name the chiefs

under whose authority he was placed.

[Footnote 190: M. Von Humboldt supposes him to have been the astronomer

of the expedition. Crit. Exam, vol. iv. p. 189, and following. In

several instances the other mariners failed to mention the name of

their captains.]

But, in spite of this reticence, we gather from the deposition of Alonzo de

Hojeda in the lawsuit brought against the crown by the son of Columbus in

1508, that Vespucius served on the squadron of Hojeda. [Footnote 191]

[Footnote 191: He states that on this voyage (May 20th, 1499, to June,

1500) he took with him Juan de la Cosa, pilot, Morigo Vespuche, and

other pilots. (Crit. Ex; vol. iv. p. 188.)]

A comparison between the narratives left by both leads to the conclusion

that the first voyage of Americus, so inaccurately dated, must be

identified with that of Alonzo. [Footnote 192]

[Footnote 192: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. pp. 195-200.]

But, instead of accompanying the latter during the entire expedition,

Vespucius, after exploring the coast of Paria with him, left him at

Hispaniola at the end five months. Then, having been absent only from May

5th to October 15th, 1499, he must have returned to Spain in time to embark

in the December of that year with the expedition Vicente Yanez Pinzon.

[Footnote 193]

[Footnote 193: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 290.]

This expedition, which ended in September, 1500 agrees in a host of details

with the second voyage of Vespucius. [Footnote 194]

[Footnote 194: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. pp. 293-316; vol. v. pp. 61-69,

212-213. M. Von Humboldt shows that the circumstances of each of the

two first voyages of Vespucius bear too distinctive a character to

render admissible the idea that they were but one voyage, that is, the

voyage which the Florentine is accused of calling the second, while its

elements, divided by him with more or less art, furnished fallaciously

the material for a first supposed voyage, bearing the false date of

1497. The first voyage was confined entirely in the northern

hemisphere, the second extended to southern regions.]

{613}

These enterprises aroused the attention of the King of Portugal, Emmanuel

le Fortune, in whose service our traveller let himself be enrolled. He

joined a squadron (May, 1501, to Sept. 1501) sent to reconnoitre the land

of Santa Cruz, or Brazil, discovered April 22d, 1500, by the Portuguese

Admiral Alvarez Cabral, who, while on his way to the Cape of Good Hope and

the East-Indies, had been dragged westward by winds and currents. In this

voyage Americus Vespucius passed the equator by a distance which he values

at 52°. On this he boasts of having traversed one fourth of the world (40°

lat. north of Lisbon to the equator 50° lat. south; total 90°, or the

quarter of a meridian.) He gives a brilliant description of the

inhabitants, of natural features in that region, and of southern

constellations. The leader of this expedition is not known. One remarkable

fact, the encounter at Cape Verd with the vessels of Alvarez Cabral,

returning from Malabar to Lisbon, and the details which Vespucius received

from a member of that expedition concerning the admiral's adventures in the

Indies, and transmitted to Pierfrancesco de' Medici, [Footnote 195] prove

the habitual veracity of the Florentine navigator, confirmed and attested

in this instance by Portuguese documents. [Footnote 196]

[Footnote 195: Letter dated at Cape Verd, June 4th, 1501.]

[Footnote 196: Crit. Exam. vol. v. pp. 69-107 and 213-215.]

The fourth voyage, (June, 1503, to June, 1504,) made probably under the

direction of Gonzalo Coelho, had an object which Americus extols beforehand

without clearly explaining it: "I shall do many things," he writes to

Medicis, "for the glory of God, the good of my country, and the perpetual

commemoration of my name." It appears that the king of Portugal wished to

discover a passage to the Indies further south than Brazil; and, if it be

true that Vespucius had already penetrated to the fiftieth degree of

southern latitude, he must have just missed giving his name to the straits,

whose discovery twenty years later immortalized Magellan. But results

disappointed these cherished hopes and anticipations. The incapacity of the

commander-in-chief, whose name the narrator conceals while roundly abusing

his presumption and folly, rendered it disastrous.

Emmanuel, occupied at that period with grand projects of conquest in

Oriental India, abandoned all attempts directed to the West. Vespucius on

his side, disgusted with the barren service of Portugal, lent ear to King

Ferdinand's solicitations, and, with a facile change of patron not without

precedent among his contemporaries, returned to Castile. We find him

leaving Seville for Valladolid, where the court was assembled, bearing an

introduction to Diego, son of Christopher Columbus, from the admiral

himself. Columbus recommends him (February 5th, 1505) as a man "to whom

fortune has been adverse, and who has not enjoyed the legitimate fruit of

his labors."

He received a commission to equip a squadron destined to seek a western

route to the "land of spices." But after two years of preparation,

Ferdinand, wearied with dissensions with his son-in-law Philippe le Beau,

abandoned the design. At all events, on the 2d of March, 1508, he appointed

Americus Vespucius to be pilot-in-chief (_piloto mayor_) at Seville,

with a salary of fifty thousand maravedis, with these duties: first, to

make sure that the pilots understood the use of astrolabe and quadrant;

second, to make out a table of positions, to bear the name of _Padron

real,_ and serve the sole purpose of fixing maritime routes; third, to

oblige pilots after each voyage to explain, in the presence of the officers

of _La Casa de Contratacion_ and of the _piloto mayor_, the exact

position of the newly discovered lands, and also any corrections in the

bearings of coasts, in order that all necessary changes might be recorded

in the _Padron real_.[Footnote 197]

[Footnote 197: Crit. Exam. vol. v. pp. 167, 168.]

It was while filling this eminent position that Americus Vespucius died at

Seville, on the 22d of February, 1512, aged sixty-one years, without having

made another voyage.

{614}

II.

Thus lived Americus Vespucius, joining actively and honorably for the last

twenty years of his life in the gigantic labors by which the mariners of

Castile and Portugal wrenched one by one her secrets from the sea.

Valued and sought by kings as well as by the most illustrious men, a little

vain himself, proud of the early education that had raised him above the

generality of navigators, with a mind rather commonplace than brilliant,

nowhere does he give evidence in his narratives of a dishonest leaning

toward usurpation; nor does a single act accuse him of such desires.

And yet usurpation there was. Let us discover its source and the manner of

its consummation.

The Italian friends with whom Americus was in correspondence probably took

upon themselves to publish his letters. The first one put in print was the

letter to Pierfrancesco de' Medici, containing an account of his third

voyage. Rich in curious details, and in vivid pictures of habits and

manners, this little work was the more striking to imaginations already

overwrought, that the narrator's explorations had embraced vast coast

regions of southern latitudes. [Footnote 198]

[Footnote 198: The fact that these discoveries of Americus had taken

place in southern regions added to their interest. Many persons still

persisted in the error of ancient cosmography, that the two temperate

zones, north and south of the equator, were alone habitable, and could

never hold communication with each other because of the burning

atmosphere of the torrid zone. We find a ludicrous and remarkable

specimen of this blind spirit of conservatism in a certain Zachariah

Sillus, who writes at Paris in 1515, that is to say, twenty-three years

after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus and seventeen years

after Vasco de Gama's expedition to the Indies: "Between the torrid

zone and the glacial zones, two zones only are habitable. By whom is

the one corresponding to our own inhabited? Macrobius affirms it; no

one has ever known, no one ever will know. For the torrid zone placed

between them interdicts all intercourse between the men of these two

regions. The superior zone, then, only is inhabited, I mean the one

lying between the northern and equatorial regions." (Bibliothèque

Magazine, No. 16169.) Others understood no better the antipodes, the

men of the opposite hemisphere standing head downward. The voyages of

Vespucius contributed largely toward the solution of these problems.]

The first publication of this third voyage appears to have been made in

Italy. The Latin language served it for a passport beyond the Alps, and

furnished the type for numerous French and German translations. The first

Latin edition known is without date, and bears the name of the publisher

Lambert, in Paris. Afterward came those of Otmar, in Augsburg, 1504,

published previously under the title of _Mundus Nova_, an expression

used by Americus himself; and those of Strasburg, published by Hupfuff, in

1505; those of Leipzig, 1506.

Soon the Italians with their _génie d'ensemble_ gather together into

ever-increasing collections various narratives published separately. First

appeared the "Book of all the Expeditions of the King of Spain among the

newly discovered Islands and Mainlands," (printed in Venice, 1504, in

quarto,) by Albertine Vercellese di Lisona. This collection comprises only

the first three voyages of Christopher Columbus, with those of Pietro

Alonzo, and of Pinzon. Three years later, the great collection of Vicenzo

absorbs all these, adding to the voyages made by Spaniards those made by

the Portuguese, and placing _en vedette_, as we say nowadays, the name

of Americus Vespucius: _Mondo Novo e Paesi Nuovamente ritrovati da

Alberico Vespuxio, Florentine_, 1507. The author, who writes

anonymously, was Alessandro Zorzi.

This book was also translated into Latin at Milan, 1508; into German by

Jobst Ruchamer, of Nuremberg, 1508; and into French, by Mathurin du

Redouer, of Paris, without date. Of the French version, several editions

followed each other in rapid succession about the year 1516.

Thus popularity became rapidly attached to the name of Americus Vespucius.

These collections, disseminated through the learned nations of Europe, gave

the Florentine the fame of having traversed a greater extent of newly

discovered country than any other man, and predisposed public opinion to

give him all the credit of the essential discovery.

{615}

But the decisive influence came from a remote corner of the Vosges.

René II., Duke of Lorraine, the old school companion of Vespucius, shared,

as has been already said, the elevated tastes natural to princes of the

Renaissance. He followed with attentive eye the explorations of navigators,

and favored the progress of geographical science.

Americus Vespucius addressed to him, as we know, from Lisbon, in 1504, an

account or rather an abstract of his four voyages.

There lived in those days in Lorraine, in the little town of Saint Dié, a

learned bookseller, a native of Fribourg-en-Brisgau, and an ancient student

in the university of that town. Following a custom of the time, he had, by

a Greek transformation, translated his name from Martin Waldsee Muller to

Martinus Hylacomylus. [Footnote 199] He prepared an edition of Ptolemaeus.

The mathematician of Alexandria, the last exponent of geographical

knowledge and of cosmography among the ancients, had been successively the

oracle of the immovable middle ages and of the invincible pioneers who

opened the modern era. The world was never weary of making reprints of his

writings, adding in a supplement what antiquity had not known of our globe,

or as the saying went, of lands outside Ptolemaeus, (_regiones extra

Ptolemaeum._)

[Footnote 199: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 99 and following. See the

positive and sagacious researches which led M. Von Humboldt to discover

the true name of Hylacomylus. The passage is of great interest, not

only on account of the problem whose solution it presents, but as

showing with what persevering ardor the illustrious author devoted

himself to the elucidation of the truth.]

But before entering upon his great work, Hylacomylus published an

introduction to the cosmography, and as an addition precious as it was

novel, enriched it with the four voyages of Americus Vespucius, under this

title "Cosmographiae introductio cum qui busdam geometriae ac astronomiae

principlis ad eam rem necessariis. Insuper quatuor Americi Vespucii

navigationes." He wrote anonymously, revealing his name only with the

second edition in 1509.

From whom did he obtain these four voyages, never before printed? No doubt

from the Duke of Lorraine. But he is silent upon that point, limiting

himself to the information that they had been translated from Italian into

French and from French into Latin.

Here and there in the nine chapters that compose his work Hylacomylus

alludes to the discoveries of Americus Vespucius, extolling their extent

and their scientific importance. "The torrid zone," he says, "is habitable

and inhabited. The Golden Chersonesus and Taprobane contain many human

beings, as well as a very considerable portion of the country entirely

unknown until lately, when it was discovered by Americus Vespucius."

Further on, in a more decided manner, after mentioning the seven climates

described by Ptolemaeus, and named after several remarkable towns,

mountains, or rivers of the northern hemisphere, Hylacomylus opposes to

them six others recently recognized in the southern hemisphere. The names

of the first five repeat those of the north in symmetrical opposition.

[Footnote 200] In the sixth, toward the antarctic region and the extremity

of Africa, he places Zanzibar, discovered shortly before, the islands of

Java Minor, (Sumatra,) Seula, (Ceylon,) with the fourth part of the world;

"and this quarter, since Americus discovered it, we may be allowed to call

the land of Americus, or America."

[Footnote 200: "Pari modo dicendum est de eis quae sunt ultra

sequinoctialem ad austrum quorum sex contraria nomina habentia sunt

lustrata: et dici possunt antidia Meroes, antidia Alexandrias, antidia

Rhodon, antidia Rhomes, (sic,) antidia Borischener, (sic,) a graeca

particula antiquae oppositum vel contra denotat."-Ch. vii.]

Finally, and it is here that this obscure author decides the question for

future ages, he enumerates the countries comprised in Europe, Asia, and

Africa.

{616}

He reminds us that Europe and Asia are the names of two queens, and

continues: "Now these three portions have been explored to their utmost

limits; and another, a fourth, has been discovered by Americus Vespucius,

(as we shall see later.) Now I see no grounds upon which opposition can be

made to naming it America, or the land of Americus, after its discoverer,

Americus, a man of sagacious genius, since Europe and Asia owe their names

to women."

Two series of distichs precede and announce the four navigations. We

mention them merely for the characteristic enthusiasm that they exhale in

honor of the fortunate mariner. He alone who sang the maritime adventures

of the Trojan hero, says the poet in closing his verses, could worthily

celebrate this theme. [Footnote 201]

[Footnote 201: The poetical part of the Cosmographiae Introductio is by

Philesius, (Ringmann,) a friend of the editor.]

This, then, was the baptism of the new-born world. It was in one of the

humblest cities of Lorraine that an unknown bookseller bade Europe and Asia

hold it with him over the font, inscribing it in the classic family by a

name thenceforth imperishable.

III.

This name became quickly famous in the Old World. Its birth in Lorraine was

an advantage in the beginning. This country was fortunately placed for

facilities of intercourse between France and Germany, very near the Rhine,

along whose banks were crowded so many famous towns from Bâle to Rotterdam,

and close to Strasburg, that centre of powerful radiation.

From the presses of Grieninger, or Gruninger, issued, in 1509, the second

edition of the Cosmography, bearing this time the author's name affixed to

the dedication. Piquant selections were made from the four voyages of

Americus, and many persons, allured by its success, falsely claimed the

paternity of the book. [Footnote 202] Long after the death of Hylacomylus

his work was destined to be reprinted at Venice in 1535 and in 1554. The

suffrage of Italy served not a little the popularity of the navigator and

the name of America.

[Footnote 202: Hylacomylus complains of this in a letter to Philesius,

dated 1509.]

Everywhere an irresistible and universal concurrence enhanced the renown of

Americus Vespucius, as wave after wave bears its tribute to the rising

tide. From the time of the appearance of that first edition, (1507,) maps

and globes were printed in Strasburg and sold at low prices, bearing

indication of the discoveries of Americus Vespucius, with his name.

[Footnote 203]

[Footnote 203: Crit. Exam, vol iv. pp. 140-142. Letters of the

Benedictine Trithemius, Aug. 12th, 1507. Humboldt shows that this

letter is often dated incorrectly 1510. Trithemius makes Vespucius a

Spaniard.]

In 1509, the same year when the second edition of Hylacomylus appeared, an

anonymous _opvscule_, another product of John Grieninger's active

press, called, "Globus mundi declaratio, sive descriptio mundi et totius

orbis terrarum," sanctions the proposition of the scholar of Saint-Dié.

This is the first geographical treatise in which the name of America takes

undisputed possession as the designation of the New World. The phraseology

in which it is couched is fantastic, and, independently of its

significance, merits a moment's attention.

"Doctors," saith the cosmography "compare our earth to the human frame as

possessing all the parts contained in a body. First, the flesh is the earth

itself; blood corresponds to water, bones to stones, veins to mountains.

The head is the East, or Asia; the feet are the West and America lately

discovered. Africa is the right arm, and our own continent of Europe the

left."

Science in her first essays was sometimes satisfied with very naive

puerilities, and young America was received under strange auspices. But at

that time, perhaps, this was an advantage. The author of the Globus shows

himself more rational while undertaking to demonstrate clearly, even to

persons of small education, the existence of antipodes whose feet are

opposed ours; and the possibility of life in any portion of the globe,

because the sun shines upon all parts of the earth--problems that disturbed

many minds.

{617}

Nevertheless, great as is his admiration for Americus Vespucius, and for

"the fourth part of the world by him discovered, that island larger than

Europe whose shores develop westward with relation to Europe and Africa,"

the geographer of Strasburg does not inscribe the name of America on his

map. He is content with the appellation of the _New World_. [Footnote

204] Pierre Apier, in 1520, was the first to enroll the name of America on

a map of the world added to an edition of Solinus. [Footnote 205]

[Footnote 204: Newe Welt. The indications on this map of the Globus are

in German.]

[Footnote 205: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 255; vol. v. pp. 174, 188.]

Then comes the author who, adding practice to precept, should have

anticipated others--we mean Hylacomylus.

His ambition, like that of every cosmographer, was to re-edit the

mathematician of Alexandria. The magnificent bounty of René II. furnished

the funds for the preparatory labors and provided for the engraving of

maps. But death interrupted the work in 1508 by snatching away its noble

patron. [Footnote 206]

[Footnote 206: We find in a treatise of 1511, composed of a tract chart

of Europe by Hylacomylus, with a description of the same continent by

his friend Philesius, an interesting tribute to the memory of René II.

Hylacomylus dedicates this map, of which he is very proud, to Duke

Antony, René's son and successor. He observes that the late duke was

"the first among the first of princes to favor the liberal arts, full

of the love of letters and of lettered men. We ourselves remember the

indulgent ear, the smiling countenance, and the good grace with which

he received the general description of the globe, and other monuments

of our literary labors offered by us to him." This book (Biblio.

Magazine, No. 16169) is entitled: Instructio manuductionem praestans in

cartam itinerariam Martini Hilacomile, cum luculentiori ipsius Europae

enarratione à Ringmanno Philesio conscripta. Strasbourg Imprimerie

Grieninger, April, 1511.]

In the language of the editors, two ecclesiastical dignitaries of

Strasburg, it was aroused from its sleep among the rocks of the Vosges only

after six years of neglect. It was published at Strasburg in the year 1513,

under the superintendence of Philesius. The maps do not present the name of

Americus, nor the body of the work that of Hylacomylus. But, following

those belonging to the geography proper of Ptolemaeus, there is a rich

supplementary atlas, which represents the geographical state of the world

in the sixteenth century, and offers us two very curious maps; a map of the

world, entitled "Orbis typus universalis juxta hydrographorum traditionem,"

with the profile of the western mainland and several islands of the

Antilles and a special map of discoveries, Tabula Terre Nove, loaded with

names that mount in a grand scale up to the fortieth degree of south

latitude. This place is eminently suited to introduce the name of America,

[Footnote 207] but we seek it in vain. It was destined to appear in a

posthumous work of the bookseller of Saint-Dié.

[Footnote 207: On the contrary, we find this inscription: _Haec terra

cum adjacentibua insulis inventa est per Columbum Januensem ex mandate

Regis Castellae._ Elsewhere the preface of the supplement contains

this singular phrase _à propos_ of the map of the world: "Charta

autem marina quam hydrographiam vocant per admiralem quondam

serenissimum _Portugaliae regis Ferdinandi_ caeteros denique

lustratores verissimis peragrationibus lustrata." (Folio, Imperial

Lib., G. 10.) How place Ferdinand on the Portuguese throne then

occupied by Emmanuel? Who is this admiral? Remark that the names of

locality on the second map are Spanish. This extraordinary confusion of

names of kings will serve to explain other errors in after times.]

In 1522, Laurentius Phrisius, who must not be confounded with Philesius,

published a new edition of Ptolemaeus at John Grieninger's in Strasburg.

Hylacomylus was dead; but how could they do better than employ the maps

prepared by him in his lifetime? "That we may not seem," says Phrisius to

the reader, "to arrogate to ourselves another's merit, know that these maps

have been lately prepared by Martin Hylacomylus, dead in Christ, and

reduced to dimensions smaller than their first form. If they are good, to

him then, and not to us, peace and place among the celestial hierarchy, in

the bosom of him who separated the edifice of this world by spaces so

marvellous. For the remainder that follows, know that it is our own work."

[Footnote 208]

[Footnote 208: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 116.]

Now, upon this map of the world, which is the work of Hylacomylus, and, is

entitled as in the Ptolemaeus of 1513, "Orbis typus universalis juxta

hydrographorum traditionem," is displayed the name of America.

{618}

And what a triumphant commentary upon it is given in the preface written by

Thomas Aucuparius! "Not less worthy of panegyric are those who, since the

days of Ptolemaeus, have succeeded by an incredible effort of genius in

exploring new countries and islands. And in the first rank among them, and

deserving an extraordinary fame, stands Americus Vespucius, the illustrious

and eminent man who discovered and explored and was the first guest of the

land of America, called to-day America, or the New World, or the fourth

part of the world; as well as of other new islands adjacent to it or lying

at no great distance."

This enthusiasm was not free from confusion. The _savans_ on the

borders of the Rhine received by repercussion the echoed reports of these

wonderful Portuguese and Spanish discoveries, without distinguishing quite

clearly the name and extent of each one. For instance, this Ptolemaeus of

1522 repeats the map of 1513, with the indication that the continent in

question with its neighboring islands was discovered by the Genoese

Columbus under orders of the King of Castile. [Footnote 209]

[Footnote 209: We have not been fortunate enough to find the Ptolemaeus

of 1522. But there exists in the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève (G. 8)

an edition of 1525, made by Bilinald Pirckeymer, at Grieninger, in

Strasburg. The atlas, in the second part of the volume, evidently

repeats in a smaller form that of 1513. The maps are identical. Now,

the last Orbis typus universalis juxta hydrographorum traditionem

exactissime depicta bears, with the sacramental date of 1522, the name

of America upon the great tract of country in the south-western part of

the Western ocean. This, then, is the first document. After the date

come the initials L. P. (Laurentius Frisius. Frisius, another form of

Phrisius.)]

The same legend, under date of 1497, adjoining the words America provincia,

on Apian's map, appears in the edition of Pomponius Mela, by Vadianus,

(Joacquin de Watt,) Bâle, 1522. Yet the first pages in the book reproduce a

letter from Vadianus to a friend, concerning the discovery of America by

Vespucius, and the remarkable proficiency in mathematics of this navigator.

The editor does not remark that the name of America upon the map is in

contradiction with that of Columbus in the legend, or that elsewhere he

attaches erroneously to the third voyage of Columbus, during which the

great navigator touched Paria, the pretended date (1497) of the discovery

of Americus Vespucius. [Footnote 210]

[Footnote 210: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 144. Columbus discovered the

terra firma of the delta of the Orinoco, (Isla Santa,) August 1st,

1498. The third voyage lasted from May 30th, 1498, to November 25th,

1500.]

This discrepancy among Rhenish geographers was not of long duration.

Simon Grynaeus, author of a collection of voyages, (Orbis Novus, Bâle,

March, 1532,) in which he inserts the four voyages of Americus Vespucius

and only the first of Columbus, does not hesitate in deciding their

respective importance; witness the following words in a little treatise by

Sebastian Munster, placed at the head of the collection: "There has been

discovered in our own day in the Western ocean, by Americus Vespucius and

Christopher Columbus, what one may call a new world, and very correctly the

fourth part of the globe, so that our earth no longer consists of three

parts, but of four; because these Indian islands surpass Europe in size,

especially the one which takes its name of America from Americus, who

discovered it." The same Munster writes in his Cosmography: "What shall I

say of these great islands America, of Paria, Cuba, Hispaniola, Yucatan?"

And again, upon a map giving the southern part of the New World: "Atlantic

Island, called Brazil and America."

The collection of Grynaeus was reprinted in Paris about the month of

November, 1532, and several times afterward.

Apian and Phrisius, the same who worked upon the Ptolemaeus of 1522, say in

their Cosmography: "America takes its name from Americus Vespucius, who

discovered it: others call it Brazil. Is it a continent or an island? We do

not yet know." Of Columbus not one word.

These references to Christopher Columbus, evoked _à contretemps_, are

only exceptions of ever lessening frequency.

{619}

The name of America in a few years had taken possession of maps and of

science, and passed into a brilliant and resonant notoriety with the

public. The erudite, those who controlled the printing press, and those

who, in the centre of Europe, formed opinions almost uninfluenced by Spain,

and whose admiration, more or less enlightened, created fame, were fairly

dazzled by Americus Vespucius. Columbus, after being faintly discerned from

time to time, at last disappeared, and was lost like a satellite in the

nimbus of a principal star planet. No doubt he could lay claim to a few

islands; but he who, unveiling the vast expanse of southern shores, had

discovered a new world, was beyond dispute Americus Vespucius, the noble,

the illustrious traveller _par excellence_--egregius et nobilissimus

inventor, visitator et primus hospes.

IV.

But why this silence respecting Christopher Columbus? Whence this apparent

conspiracy against a man who in our own day rears himself like a giant

above all those who navigated the route opened by his genius? Where shall

we seek the cause of the ingratitude no longer peculiar of Spain, but

attributable to all Europe, that pains our hearts?

The truth must be told: he himself was one of its principal causes.

The illustrious Genoese never courted publicity. The only papers printed

during his life, concerning his discoveries, were his first voyage, taken

from his letter of March 14th, 1493, to the treasurer Sanchez; and his

fourth, an account of which he addressed to the kings in a letter from

Jamaica, (July 7th, 1503;) [Footnote 211] the one in Latin at Rome, (1493,)

the other at Venice, translated into Italian, (1505.) The title of

_Lettera rarissima_ by which this last document is designated, shows

plainly that it was not for general distribution. Of the writings of

Columbus these are all that were published up to the close of the

eighteenth century. [Footnote 212]

[Footnote 211: First voyage from August 3d, 1492, to March 15, 1493:

discovery of the Bahama islands, and of Hayti. Fourth voyage from May

11th, 1502, to November 7th, 1504; discovery of the coast of the

continent from Honduras to Puerto de Mosquitos, at the end of the

Isthmus of Panama. First notion of the existence of another sea to the

west.]

[Footnote 212: Crit. Exam. vol. ii. p. 330; vol. iv. p. 72 and note.]

This great man thought it for his interest to keep the secret, if not of

his discoveries, at least of the route he had followed. As his treaty of

Santa Fé with Isabella and Ferdinand secured to him the government and a

part of the fruits of the lands discovered by him, he had not cared to

provoke or facilitate competition. Indeed we have two letters from

Isabella, (September 5th, 1493, and August 16th, 1494,) reproaching him for

leaving the degrees of latitude blank, and asking for a complete chart of

the islands with their names and distances. [Footnote 213] He became still

less communicative after the crown of Castile violated its engagements with

him, (1495,) and when his enemy Fonseca gave up his charts to the navigator

Hojeda. They had reduced him, he said, to the position of a man who opens

the door for others to pass through. Silence may, then, have seemed to him

a means of defending his legitimate possessions, or, at least, of

diminishing the force of attacks upon his just rights.

[Footnote 213: Crit. Exam. vol. iii. p. 340. We hear of a chart given

at Rome, in 1505, by Bartholemew Columbus, the admiral's brother, to a

canon of St. John of Lateran, and given by him to Alessandro Zozi,

author of the collection of 1507. Its fate is unknown. Crit. Exam. vol.

iv. p. 80, note. This does not look like publicity.]

Besides, though his discovery anticipated by six years the arrival of the

Portuguese in the East-Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, it was eclipsed by

the brilliant voyages of Vasco de Gama and Alvares Cabral, followed as they

were by immediate results. What were Spaniards and Portuguese in search of?

The Indies, the empire of Cathay, or of China, those regions depicted by

antiquity and by the travellers of the middle ages as gorged with precious

metals, with pearls and diamonds, with spices and glittering tissues.

{620}

Now, the Portuguese had been wafted to the very source of these treasures.

In the earliest years of the sixteenth century, their fleets returned laden

with spoils from kingdoms of sonorous names, rendered famous by the songs

or by the ambition of the poets and conquerors of classic antiquity. All

this time the Spaniards, following the steps of Christopher Columbus, were

groping in the western seas among remote regions supposed by them to belong

to extreme Asia, finding only savage tribes where they had looked for

imposing monarchies. They had picked up a few pearls, a little gold, and

some slaves, and had returned to Europe, unable to conceal from themselves

the fact that their rivals of Lisbon owed more to Vasco de Gama than

Castile to Christopher Columbus.

If, then, in the eyes of history, the glory of the immortal Genoese lies in

having sought with a reflective and discerning boldness, and discovered

more than he sought, namely, an unknown world independent of all other

lands, at a time when the only aim in view was to open a western route to

the "land of spices," in the beginning his voyage looked like a half

successful enterprise. Was the talk of discoveries, properly speaking? What

were a small number of islands compared with that southern country coasted

by Americus to the fiftieth degree of south latitude without finding its

termination?

The discovery of the Southern sea by Balboa at the Isthmus of Panama,

(1513,) the extraordinary conquests of Mexico and Peru, the adventures of a

Cortez and of a Pizarro, chilled yet more the public opinion toward him

whose works, considered then so humble, had given the impetus to these

prodigious enterprises.

A little while yet, and he was considered a simpleton for believing that

his navigation from east to west had brought him to Asia, and for having

found what he did not seek. John Beller, in reprinting at Anvers (1584) the

Cosmography of Apian and Frisius, adds a description of the Indies, drawn

from the Cosmography of Jerome Girava, of Tarragona. The latter, _à

propos_ of Cuba, explains that under the name of Indies are comprehended

all the lands recently discovered. "This name," he says, "comes from the

fact that the Genoese, Christopher Columbus, a distinguished mariner and a

poor cosmographer, [Footnote 214] having obtained in 1492 the favor and aid

of Ferdinand the Catholic and of Isabella to go in search of regions until

then unseen and unknown, called them the Indies. After making the

discovery, he returned in the same year, saying that he had found the

Indies. Therefore have these lands retained the name."

[Footnote 214: Naucierus insignia ac mediocriter cosmographia peritus,

p. 167, Biblioth Magazine, 15824.]

Thus did Christopher Columbus lose ground so materially in the admiration

of his contemporaries that his end was obscure and almost overlooked. Peter

Martyr of Anghiera, who is called his friend, but hardly seems to have

merited the title, for two months and a half saw him upon the bed of pain

to which the last great crisis nailed him at Valladolid. He does not speak

of this illness in his letters, nor of his death which took place May 20th,

1506, short time after his own departure. His Oceanic Decades mention it

incidentally several years later.[Footnote 215]

[Footnote 215: It was between the years 1510 and 1514 that Pierre

Martyr thought proper to remember the great man's death.]

Why wonder, then, that the editors of Vicenzo's collection in 1507, and the

translator of this collection into Latin in 1508, inform us that at the

moment they write the admiral and his brother are living honorably in the

splendid court of Castile? Grynaeus in 1532 speaks in the same terms in his

Orbis Novus. [Footnote 216] So had fame abandoned the life and the grave of

Christopher Columbus.

[Footnote 216: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. pp. 24, 124.]

{621}

V.

So far we have traced the principal features of the nautical career of

Americus Vespucius. Still following the light of Humboldt's brilliant

researches, we have found in the bookstore of Saint-Dié, the inventor of

the name of America; we have shown how and at what period this appellation

passed from the _Introduction of the Cosmography_ on to maps and into

public use; and how motives personal to Christopher Columbus, and the

astounding exploits of Portuguese or Spanish conquerors, threw into the

shade the services and genius of the most daring mariner the world has ever

seen.

We have shown that a strong current of public opinion, self-formed in a

certain sense, had developed, without leaving room to suppose or suspect

any culpable participation in Americus Vespucius. Strictly speaking, this

should absolve us from all obligation to justify him further from the

reproach of usurpation. Yet it is our intention to conclude with a review

of that side of the question.

To begin with, there exists no proof or presumption that he had any hand in

the publication of his voyage. The work contains details such as he would

certainly not have consigned to a writing intended for the public; as, for

example, when speaking of the second voyage, he complains, in a letter to

Soderini, that the Queen Isabella had taken from him a shell to which were

found attached one hundred and thirty pearls. "After that," he continues:

"I took good care how I showed her such precious things."

Does not he himself tell us that he has in reserve the project of

publishing a complete and extended narrative, the object of his assiduous

cares, and the hope of his future glory? So scrupulously, it appears, he

observed Horace's precept, (nonumque prematur in annum,) that death

surprised him while still hesitating to bring it to the light. Its destiny

is unknown.

Living and writing at Seville, in the very centre of the excitement of

discoveries, among a crowd of seafaring men who had seen, accompanied, or

talked with Christopher Columbus, whom he survived only six years, how can

we suppose that he could conceive the plan of attributing to himself an

honor known by all to belong to the admiral? And if he had dared to do so,

how could he with impunity have attempted it before such judges, without

calling forth a cry of indignation that should resound to the furthest

extremities of Europe?

It is said that he gave to his first voyage, which really dates from May

20th, 1499, the fraudulent date of May 20th, 1497, in order to rob Columbus

of priority in the discovery of terra firma. [Footnote 217] But in that

case, would he not have adjusted his dates more adroitly? Would he have

committed the gross blunder of assigning the end of this voyage to October

15th, 1499, mentioning directly afterward that he began the second in May,

1499, [Footnote 218] that is to say, five months before his return from the

first? What answer could he have made to those who had the registers of La

Casa de Contratacion in hand, [Footnote 219] and, armed with universal

testimony, would have told him that, pending the pretended duration of this

first expedition, all Seville and Cadiz had seen him occupied with

preparations for the third voyage of Columbus, who set sail May 30th. 1498.

[Footnote 217: Remember that Columbus touched terra firma at the delta

of the Orinoco, August 1st, 1498.]

[Footnote 218: The edition of Hylacomylus bears date 1489, a printer's

error.]

[Footnote 219: These registers bear their testimony at the present day.

We had occasion to refer to them in the first part of this article.]

Moreover, these errors in dates were extremely common at the commencement

of the sixteenth century. Education was incomplete. The means of

verification were hard to obtain concerning expeditions that crossed each

other in every sense. Thus, in the eighteen years following Vasco de Gama's

expedition, the king of Portugal sent no less than 294 vessels to India and

to the land of the Holy Cross, (Brazil.) The fourteen expeditions that

sailed from Spanish ports between 1496 and 1509, though less numerous,

followed each other as closely, and were no less difficult to disentangle.

{622}

The hurry of copying and of printing multiplied errors.

The different editions of the voyages of Vespucius are full of

contradictions in dates, a confusion that seems to exclude all reasonable

suspicion of intentional falsification. [Footnote 220] Christopher

Columbus erred as to the duration of the two passages of his first

expedition, and that at the very moment, when toward its close, he

approached the shores of Europe. [Footnote 221] The most exact and

attentive historians err constantly as to well-authenticated facts, as, for

instance, Orviédo, the official historian of the Indies, in asserting as a

notorious fact that Columbus discovered the Indies in 1491. [Footnote 222]

[Footnote 220: Crit. Exam. vol. v. p. 111.]

[Footnote 221: Ibid. vol. v. p. 201.]

[Footnote 222: Instead of 1492. M. Humboldt cites many similar errors.]

Not daring to misrepresent the facts in Andalusia, did Americus induce the

editors in Lorraine to tell falsehoods at a distance, acting in his stead?

Or, to speak more correctly, did he get them to decree to him the honors of

the discovery, and suggest to them the name of America? We have absolutely

no ground for the supposition. Nowhere do the numerous publications taking

their origin from the Cosmography of Hylacomylus allude to any relation

direct or indirect with the Florentine. If the maps of the editions of

Ptolemaeus in 1513 and 1522, had resulted from interested suggestions on

the part of Americus Vespucius, we should not find upon them, in large

characters, the indication that the great southern country was discovered

by Christopher Columbus, the Genoese. This southern country would assuredly

have extended to that famous fiftieth degree of south latitude, of which

Americus was so proud, instead of ending somewhere about the fortieth

degree. The editors of 1513 would not have fallen into the singular blunder

of making Ferdinand the Catholic, king of Portugal. Some explanation would

be needed, too, of the impostor's having selected as an accomplice an

obscure scholar in a still more obscure town of Lorraine, (which an eminent

representative of the scientific world tried lately to locate in the depths

of Hungary,) [Footnote 223] where he had many Italian friends to whom he

would more naturally have addressed himself. And one might reasonably ask

why the good people of Saint-Dié and Strasburg (whom one cannot know

through their writings without conceiving a high opinion of their character

and of their devotion to science) could have participated so coolly in a

dishonest action, or even have entered hoodwinked into a snare spread for

their ingenuousness--a snare, too, of which no trace remains.

[Footnote 223: Navarrete. Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 103.]

To this accusation consisting of gratuitous and baseless assertions, there

is a crowd of real motives to be opposed.

It is far more natural to admit, taking into consideration the extreme

difficulties of communication at that period, that the enthusiasm of

Hylacomylus and his Strasburg neighbors was spontaneous. Such is certainly

the character of the extracts we have presented to the reader. It is

extremely probable that Americus Vespucius never saw the Cosmography of

1507 or the Globus of 1509, and that he was to the end unconscious of the

dangerous honor bestowed upon him at Saint-Dié. As to the maps illustrated

with his name, they appeared in 1520 and 1522, eight and ten years after

his death.

But for the tyranny of habit, which demands a response, point for point, to

charges once preferred against an individual, we should have suddenly

adopted a more radical system, and have declared not only that Americus

Vespucius did not entertain the vile and criminal intentions ascribed to

him with regard to Christopher Columbus, but that, at the stage of ideas

and of science existing in his day, he could not have conceived them.

{623}

In using the expression New World, or the fourth part of the world, we

attach to it the precise sense of the vast American continent. Our eyes

instinctively behold that colossal dike, which, stretching, so to speak,

from pole to pole, restrains and divides the two oceans facing easterly

toward Europe and Africa, and westerly toward Asia, but separated by

enormous distances from all three.

We must set aside this preconceived idea, and return in thought to the

latter days of the fifteenth century.

The ancients and the travellers of the middle ages prolonged Asia

indefinitely eastward; and when at last they set a term to that country by

India, the Mangi and Cathay, (China,) they continued it again by sowing in

handfuls through the neighboring seas innumerable archipelagoes. It was

while more especially acting upon the words of antiquity that Christopher

Columbus braved the awful solitudes of the Atlantic, and, bearing directly

westward, sought the Indies by another route than that used by the

Portuguese. When the unknown land, the prize of his divination, rose from

the bosom of the waters, the admiral never for an instant doubted that he

was about to plant the standard of Castile upon an Asiatic island. He took

Cuba for the very continent of Asia, _the end and the beginning of the

Indies_. "I have discovered," wrote he to Pope Alexander VI. (February,

1502,) "333 leagues of the terra firma of Asia." On his third voyage, the

spectacle of the immense flood of the Orinoco having suggested to him the

very rational idea that such a river must belong to a large country, he

made of it the India of the Ganges. In this conviction he lived and died.

In the same way Americus Vespucius, during his second voyage, coasting

along the country destined to bear his name, fully believed himself to be

in Asia. He tried to find Cape Cattigara in the great gulf of Ptolemaeus;

[Footnote 224] and followed for 400 leagues a shore which was, he said, the

end of Asia, by the eastern side, and the commencement by the western side.

"This expedition has lasted thirteen months, during which we have run the

greatest risks, and discovered an infinite stretch of the land of Asia as

well as a number of islands." [Footnote 225] In passing over to the

Portuguese service afterward, it was with a hope of pursuing his

investigations, and of "finding the Island of Taprobana, (Ceylon,) situated

between the sea of the Indus and the sea of the Ganges." His fourth had for

its object the Molucca Islands, the land of spices, and Malacca.

[Footnote 224: Sinus Magnus. Ptolemaeus took the Indian ocean for a

sea, bounded on the north by Asia, and on the south by Africa, the

latter continent widening from west to east, to form the southern

barrier of the Indian ocean.]

[Footnote 225: "Discoprendo infinitissima terra de l'Asia e gran copia

d'isole."--Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 299 and note, et passim.]

The conviction of these two men decided general opinion, as is attested by

the name of the Indies applied to the western lands. Both had passed away

before Balboa's march to the great ocean (1513) and Magellan's voyage

unsealed all eyes and dissipated the dreams of Ptolemaeus.

Now, since it is an indisputable fact that Christopher Columbus and

Americus Vespucius never had an intuition of their veritable discovery, and

that for the rest of their lives both of them firmly believed that they had

reached the extreme end of the continent of Asia, how could the one have

planned to frustrate the other of the glory of having revealed a new world

whose existence they neither of them suspected? How could Vespucius

undertake to slip surreptitiously into history, and impose a contraband

name upon a continent that only seemed to him susceptible of bearing the

name of Asia? Moreover, what personal advantage could he hope to reap from

fraudulently dating his arrival at Paria during his first expedition, 1497,

when the discovery of Oriental Asia was looked upon as accomplished by

Christopher Columbus five years before?

{624}

Let us also take these expressions of _fourth part of the world_ and

_new world_ according to their original sense, and not with the

absolute signification attached to them at the present day. In the mouth of

Americus Vespucius, the former meant simply that he had passed over,

between Lisbon and the extreme point of his explorations, an arc of 90°,

whether the quarter of a grand circle or of the terrestrial circumference

from one pole to the other. As to the latter, it was quite natural that the

extraordinary and unexpected extent of the Asiatic lands, contemplated for

the first time, and the aspect of a nature of which nothing European could

give an idea, with inhabitants of a strange color and of cannibal habits;

it was quite natural, we repeat, that the navigator should exclaim that

before him lay a new world.

Cosmographers in their turn were struck by the interminable succession of

shores, whose development south of the equator resolved, contrary to old

prejudices, the problems so long agitated concerning the torrid zone and

the second temperate zone, and the question whether or not the sun

enlightened the southern hemisphere in the same manner as the northern.

Such a theatre suddenly thrown open to geographic science appeared to them

worthy to rival Europe by its gigantic proportions, and to be accounted a

new part of the world. And yet it was not considered the New World, as we

understand it, until the time when, explorations being completed, it was

known to have nothing in common with the continent or the archipelagoes of

Asia. If precaution had been taken to disengage this idea, the accusation

against Americus Vespucius would have died a natural death in the

beginning.

But we are told that he abused his office of _piloto mayor_, and his

right of rectifying the maps by inserting his own name upon them.

This assertion is not sustained by the shadow of a proof. Mariners were not

in the habit of giving their own names to the lands they discovered,

whether Americus Vespucius, Columbus, Balboa, or Magellan. Had he done so,

it would have had only the very restricted and allowable signification of a

name applied to one of the numerous islands near Asia that seemed to spring

from the sea on all sides to greet the eyes of navigators. The scholars of

Lorraine and Alsace had no other view in selecting for this destiny the

largest southern country. They treated as coequals in importance the great

island of America and the islands of Paria, Cuba, Hispaniola, and Yucatan.

[Footnote 226] Finally, the name of America, applied to the whole of the

New World, resulted from the mistake by which the island (Cuba) was taken

for the mainland, and the mainland (Paria) for the island. When with time

the first error was recognized, they extended to the whole the appellation

given to what had proved to be the principal part.

[Footnote 226: Cosmography of Munster, quoted above.]

For this Americus Vespucius could not have been responsible. He deserves,

then, to preserve in the estimation of posterity the esteem accorded to him

by all his contemporaries. He was loved and respected during his life, and

from this fact we shall in conclusion draw a new testimony.

VI.

In the first place, Americus Vespucius possessed the friendship of

Christopher Columbus. At the commencement of our article we saw Vespucius

going to Toro, (where was assembled the court of Castile,) recommended by

the admiral to his son Diego. We give the letter entire:

{625}

SEVILLE, Feb. 5, 1505.

"My Dear Son: Diego Mendez [Footnote 227] left here Monday, the 3d of

this month. Since his departure I have talked with Amerigo Vespuchy, who

is going to court, called thither by business concerning navigation. He

has always shown a desire to please me; and he is a very able man.

Fortune has shown herself adverse to him as to many others. His labors

have not proved so profitable to him as should have naturally been the

case. He is going to court in my behalf, and with an ardent desire of

effecting something useful to me, if occasion should offer. While in this

place I cannot specify in what way he can serve us, not knowing how they

stand affected toward him, but he is quite determined to do all in his

power for my good. You will see for yourself how you can best employ him,

for he will speak and set everything at work; I want it to be done

secretly, that nothing may be suspected. I told him everything I could

concerning our interests." [Footnote 228]

[Footnote 227: A faithful servant of Columbus.]

[Footnote 228: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. pp. 29,30, and Washington Irving,

vol. iv. App. No. 9.]

He who expressed himself thus concerning Americus had known him not merely

a day or two, but for long years.

But let us admit that he was the dupe of a consummate hypocrite. The

traitor was to be unmasked when death should relieve him of the obstacle

who had been a source of such insupportable impatience to him. Witnesses

there were, however, to denounce him. Let us hear them:

Sebastian Cabot, a worthy rival of the most illustrious navigators of his

day, had been summoned from England to Spain about the year 1512, to

succeed Americus as corrector of geographic tables. Three years later he

took occasion to bear testimony to his expertness in the determination of

latitudes.

Peter Martyr, whose hand falls willingly on all whom he suspects of

intrigue, whether correctly or incorrectly, has only words of praise for

Vespucius, _à propos_ of his knowledge of nautical astronomy and of

the art of navigation.

Ramusio, who employed thirty-four years of his life (1523-1557) in

preparing and publishing his great collection of travels, and knew how to

wither with his indignation all who enviously cavilled at Columbus,

[Footnote 229] speaks five times in terms of high esteem, "of that high

intelligence, of the excellent Florentine endowed with such fair genius,

_il signor_ Amerigo Vespucio."

[Footnote 229: Those who maintained that Columbus had stolen the

knowledge of the New World from a pilot who died in his house. Oviedo

echoed this calumnious report. (History of the West-Indies, 1535.)]

But a discordant voice arose. Michel Servet, in re-editing the geography of

Ptolemaeus at Lyons (1535, 1541,) says severe things of Americus, but not

without making mistakes. "Columbus," he says, "discovered during a new

voyage the continent and many more islands, of which the Spaniards are now

completely masters. They then are totally misled who would call this

continent America, since Americus never touched it until long after

Columbus, and since he went there not with the Spaniards, but with the

Portuguese, and to make trade."

Without pausing to notice details, we will confine ourselves to the

morality of Vespucius which the author does not attack. He only blames

those who invented the name of America. [Footnote 230]

[Footnote 230: M. Von Humboldt, vol. iv. p. 137, note, corrects

Servet's inaccuracies. Vespucius made a voyage for Spain with Hojeda in

1499. It was assuredly not in the character of a merchant, but probably

of an astronomer. A striking circumstance! this edition of 1535

contains after all the map of 1522, bearing the name of Americus.]

To this accusation, such as it is, the History of India, by Gomara, (1551,)

answered contemptuously: "There are persons who enjoy blackening Alberico

Vespucio's reputation, as may be seen by some editions of Ptolemaeus in

Lyons."

Now, having seen the proofs drawn from those who have spoken, let us look

at the counter-proofs of those who have not spoken--a testimony not without

significance.

Witness, for example, Oviedo, who systematically cries down Christopher

Columbus. He is silent as to the supposed pretension of Vespucius to

priority in the discovery of the mainland. Is it to be supposed that, if

the Florentine had actually claimed this honor, Oviedo would not have taken

him under his protection, and used his claim to make a breach in a

reputation that annoyed him?

{626}

But there is another silence more decisive. Two years after the death of

Christopher Columbus, that is to say in 1508, Don Diego, his eldest son,

brought a lawsuit against the crown before the council of the Indies, to

recover dignities and privileges that had been guaranteed to the admiral in

the treaties acceded to by Ferdinand and Isabella. It was essentially

important to the fiscal to prove that Columbus had been anticipated by some

one else in Paria, in order to deprive the heirs of all claim to the

revenues drawn from that country at least. Nor, although in this debate

efforts were made to draw from the seamen testimony inimical to Columbus,

and although the fiscal disdained to use no rumor, however vague or futile

it might be--descending to every refinement of deceit and fraud, and

pushing the hostility of the investigation even to extravagance, according

to Las Casas; yet neither Americus Vespucius, who was still alive during

the first four years, nor John Vespucius, his nephew, a renowned pilot,

ever brought forward any claim to priority in the discovery. They were not

called up as witnesses; the cosmographies printed in other countries in his

honor were not mentioned; [Footnote 231] and the lawsuit came to an end in

1527, after nineteen mortal years, without the name of Vespucius having

been brought forward in opposition to the great victim of injustice.

[Footnote 231: It is quite possible that they had not been seen in

Seville. This furnishes a strong though indirect proof that Vespucius

did not know of their existence.]

About the year 1513, Fernando Columbus, the admiral's second son, put the

last touches to the history of his father. An openly expressed and pious

indignation animated him against those who had embittered with so many

mortifications that illustrious career. He leaves the memory of Americus

Vespucius in peaceful repose. Evidently there was nothing to avenge in that

quarter.

Sole and last of his contemporaries, finishing in extreme old age, at

eighty-five, in the year 1559, a general history of the Indies, Las Casas

accuses Vespucius of having falsified the date of his first voyage, and

given the number 1497 to the editors of Lorraine, with the premeditated

design of robbing Christopher Columbus of a glory so dearly acquired.

[Footnote 232] Nevertheless, he does not prove this, nor try to do so. Las

Casas was in fact mistaken. Americus Vespucius was a posthumous usurper,

and absolutely irresponsible.

[Footnote 232: Humboldt shows that mistakes in dates occur in Las Casas

as in all the works of that day. Vol. iv. p. 139; vol. v. p. 191.

Charlevoix (History of St. Domingo,) says that Diego Columbus, in

gaining the suit raised by the fiscal, condemned Vespucius. Diego

simply proved that the admiral was the first to touch the coast of

Paria, 1498. He never thought of condemning Vespucius, who did not

appear in the case. The records of the lawsuit were not printed before

1829. Crit. Exam. vol. v. p. 204, and note 2.]

But a reaction came to the public conscience in favor of Christopher

Columbus. To ingratitude, to the base passions and mean motives so cruelly

leagued against him, there succeeded a more sound appreciation, in

proportion as, further removed by time, perspective views re-established

matters in their true position. He, who in 1492, had found the small island

of San Salvador in the little group of the Bahamas, was not known to have

that day discovered the New World. And yet it was another man's name that

his discovery was destined to immortalize! Then opinion, deceived in the

first instance about Christopher Columbus, erred in regard to Americus

Vespucius. The latter had to bear the weight of an error he had not

provoked, and, condemned without a hearing by a sort of universal consent,

to incur the sad celebrity of imposture unveiled.

But to-day, we believe, a more enlightened judgment has acquitted him. His

fame is pure. Christopher Columbus does not accuse one who was his friend.

One glory does not mar another. It is sweet to have at least one injustice

less to inscribe in the martyrology of great initiators.

------

{627}

Translated from the German.

Three Leaves From an Old Journal.

I.

Milan, May 4, 1811.

I arrived at Milan, at eight P.M., two days ago. I had never before seen

the magnificent cathedral, and I had everything to set off the picture on

which I came unexpectedly. The slender sickle of the new moon hung in the

violet sky, crimsoned in the west with the lingering sunlight: the

street-lamps, just lighted, threw before me a line of red glow; the bronze

statue surmounting the lofty obelisk rose in the clear blue above; around

it silence, with a tumult below of a crowd hurrying to the theatre. While I

stood lost in admiration, I saw two men, dressed for travel like myself,

emerge from the shadow of one of the pillars. Their voices as they

approached told me who they were, though I had not seen them in five years.

"Hermann! Adolph!" I exclaimed; and they greeted me with joy.

In a few moments we were seated at a table near the door of the nearest

cafe, flasks of the Lombard champagne, the foaming wine of Asti, before us,

each telling his adventures since our separation. From the same Fatherland,

we had travelled far in different directions. They had just come from the

Tyrol; from beholding the holy strife waged against the overbearing power

of France by those brave sons of the mountains. We talked of those events,

of those true-hearted patriots, and of our trust in justice human and

divine. Adolph had visited the noble hero, Hofer, and read us a poem he had

composed in his dwelling. I took a copy of the verses.

We had little thought of our imprudence in thus discoursing, as we talked

till midnight, when the people were returning from the theatre. With

promises of another meeting, we then parted and I went to my lodgings.

Before I had walked far, I heard heavy, jingling steps close behind me,

and, turning, saw a French gendarme. I crossed toward a side street; he

followed, and suddenly seized me by the arm. "_Monsieur, votre

portefeuille_." he said; and, when I gave it up, bade me follow him.

He led me to a lofty old building, the large door of which was secured with

heavy bolts. When it swung open, I saw French soldiers on guard. My captor

spoke apart with an officer, who presently gave me in charge to two

soldiers. A turnkey, bearing a lamp, preceded us, and, going up-stairs, we

entered a gloomy gallery. An iron-barred door was opened, and I was thrust

into a narrow cell, ventilated only by a small grated window, through which

gleamed a ray of starlight. The gendarme then came in, searched me, and

took away my papers, handing back my watch and purse. I was then asked if I

wanted anything; to which I replied with a bitter laugh; and with a not

uncourteous "_au revoir_," the soldiers departed.

I threw myself on the straw mattress, and ruminated in the darkness on my

own imprudence and my probable fate. I was only twenty-one, and full of the

hope of great deeds in my country's service. I had parents, sisters, and

one dearer than all; yet, for my love to them and to my native land, I

should, no doubt, on the morrow be forced to kneel and receive the fire of

the soldiers. Thought was agony, but I could not help thinking. Suddenly

the dead silence of night was broken by a tone of melody so soft, so

exquisite, so melancholy, that it penetrated my soul. It was no song; it

was simply a strain of melody--such as brought tears to my eyes--such as

was never heard before.

{628}

Orpheus might have drawn it forth! It was--yes, I was sure it was--the

sound of a violin!

Only a violin and yet such music--in my cold despair, with the galleys or

death before me--it raised me to the summit of rapture! With the

profoundest feelings of solemnity, it blended all the joy of freedom! How

it stole on the stillness of night, wafted through the bars of my window;

clear, softly swelling, plaintive, imploring like a prayer of

love--yielding like the timid bride--how did that wondrous harmony possess

my soul! Various airs were apparently improvised; sometimes the tones

glided like magic; then rising into power, they melted into the most

enchanting melody; ever clear, as if the notes had been distinct

pearl-drops. Then the rhapsodical strains passed, by a strange but charming

transition, into deep and wonderful pathos. It was full of sadness sweet

and tender, like a mourner's sigh; now it rose into silvery richness, now

gradually faded away; the melancholy plaint of an imprisoned king! It

filled me with calmness and trust in the midst of misfortunes.

The music continued at intervals. I knew not whether to wonder most at the

composition or the execution of the player. Then he passed into strange

combinations, into bolder and wilder flights; his music was full of fire;

he seemed under the influence of inspiration. He seemed to create

difficulties only to triumph over them, and surpassing harmony was in all.

I had played the violin, (I have never attempted it since,) and could never

have imagined the instrument capable of what I heard. When the music

ceased, it lingered unforgotten in my soul.

At daylight I heard the beating of a drum, and I climbed to my window to

see what was going on. It overlooked the court, and I saw a company of

soldiers, with three prisoners standing in front of them. The officer gave

a sign, and they marched away. Just then, my cell door was opened by the

jailer, who, in reply to my questions, said: "Those prisoners are to die in

an hour. They are suspected of treason; of having favored the insurrection

among the Tyrolese."

These words were my death-warrant. I listened, shuddering, but with

composure. The jailer then informed me that the prisoners were allowed to

go into the court at that hour, and I could descend if I chose. I did so. I

found myself in a crowd of rough men, collected out of Lombardy, as its

scum, by the energy of the French government. At a distance from the

others, leaning against a pillar, his eyes turned toward the rising sun, I

saw a young man about twenty-five, apparently worn out with suffering. His

form was emaciated, his face deadly pale; his eyes were sunken; his nose

was aquiline; his forehead broad and high; and his tangled mass of black

hair, with a long beard, gave him a wild aspect. But there was a touching

interest in the sorrowful expression of his chiselled mouth and the lines

of his blanched face. He noticed no one, and was quite unconscious of my

long, earnest gaze.

Suddenly he went up to the guard who had charge of the cells, and spoke to

him earnestly in Italian. I heard his voice in moving accents of entreaty.

"No, you cannot!" replied the old man, sternly. "And if you are not quiet

of nights, I will even cut your last string for you."

"It is the musician!" I cried to myself, and I hastened to speak to him.

But my steps were checked by hearing my own name pronounced behind me. The

gendarme who had arrested me stood there, and sternly bade me follow him. I

dared not hesitate. We went out of the door, and I saw a carriage in

waiting. My conductor motioned me to get in, and followed me. After a short

drive the carriage stopped before a handsome house. The French soldier

alighted, held the door open for me, and led me up the steps and into the

house. We stood in the hall some time; at length a door opened, and a voice

cried, "_Entrez!_" I went in alone.

{629}

A gentleman in military dress stood in the room, and extended his hand to

me. I recognized him at once. Four years before, in Berlin, General K. had

been brought wounded to the house of my father. Though a political enemy,

he had received tender care and nursing till restored to strength.

He grasped my hand cordially. "You have been imprudent, my young friend,"

he cried. "Had I not occupied this post, nothing could have saved your

life. You are now at liberty."

"And Hermann--and Adolph," I questioned.

"They are free also."

I poured out thanks, which the general interrupted. "You must all be my

guests to-day," he said. "To-morrow I leave Milan with my troops, and you

must depart, or your adventure might still have serious consequences. I

have had your passports made out--to Germany."

II.

Paris, April 13, 1814.

A distinguished musical amateur--an intimate friend, to whom I had told

the story of my imprisoned violinist, and who thought it a romance highly

colored by imagination--sent me a note to say that I was to be treated to a

violin concert, by way of curing my enthusiasm. Lafont had promised to give

it; my friend took him at his word. It was to come off that evening, and

Baillot, Kreuzer, and Rode were invited to take part in the music.

During the last four years I had heard the best violin players in the

different cities where I had sojourned, but none even approached the

unknown performer. Now, my ideal was to be tested by hearing the four most

celebrated masters in the world!

The saloon was brilliantly lighted, and filled with a crowd of the artistic

and fashionable. The splendor was distasteful to me; I thought of the

dungeon in Milan, and the melody that seemed wafted from heaven.

After the overture, Lafont opened the concert. He displayed the most

finished grace in andante as in allegro; the most exquisite polish and

silvery clearness of tone; but his playing--compared to my prisoner's--was

like a delicate miniature beside a grand historical painting.

Kreuzer played next. His tones were full and clear, and rose into rare

boldness and strength; many passages were brilliant as a string of

diamonds; but it was the brilliancy of polished metal or jewels, not the

living beam that penetrates the soul.

Next we heard Baillot. His performance glowed with a noble fire. He drew

forth a full, energetic harmony that thrilled me; it was glorious! He ruled

the realm of sound like a monarch. But my prisoner ruled it like a god!

Rode appeared last. His form was impressive in grace and dignity; his

features were expressive and full of magnetic attraction. I started when he

began to play; for he stirred memory to its depths. He seemed to embody the

picture that had been floating before my fantasy. His music breathed the

same fire and fervor, restrained by kindred power. At one moment, he rose

to a height that seemed to equal the stranger's; but he could not sustain

it. I felt the difference. In Rode it was a wonderful, a masterly effort--

that which my prisoner accomplished with perfect ease. _His_ chainless

spirit would have soared upward and onward, seeking prouder heights, more

fathomless depths. _He_ swept the empyrean till nearing the confines

of purer worlds, and gave back to men in unrivalled melodies the music

heard from other spheres.

After the concert was over, my friend M---- introduced me to the celebrated

artists, to whom I was bound to praise their admirable performances. I said

nothing of my adventure in Milan; but Lafont, who had heard of it from

M----, questioned me, and then I related the occurrence.

{630}

They all laughed except Rode. I tried to describe the mysterious music,

mentioning peculiar difficulties overcome in a wonderful manner by the

prisoner. "Oh! you are jesting!" exclaimed Lafont. They did not believe me.

I was not well pleased, and soon after took my leave. Some one followed me

as I walked from the house. It was Rode.

He expressed himself deeply affected by what I had told them, and asked me

if it was certainly true. I assured him it was.

"I can believe you," he said, "and, furthermore, I am sure there is but one

man on earth who can be your mysterious prisoner. I heard him myself

fifteen years ago. I was in Genoa, and going home late one evening, when I

heard a violin played in a manner that filled me with surprise. The music

was enchanting. At length I discovered the performer to be a youth hardly

grown out of boyhood. He stood on a garden wall, and was looking up toward

a window, while he drew from the instrument sounds which revealed mysteries

in music of which I had never dreamed before. I stood in the shadow and

listened. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and shone full on the

boy's face and form; he was like what you have described.

"When he ceased playing, the window was softly opened, and the face of a

young girl appeared. The next moment I heard a harsh voice exclaim:

'_Traditore! pel diavolo!_' The boy sprang from the wall into the

street, plunged into a dark alley, and disappeared. A head peered over the

wall, and oaths and menaces were profusely poured forth. The light in the

window had been quickly extinguished. Some love affair, of course! After

waiting some time, I went on, and as I passed by the wall trod upon

something. It was a violin bow, no doubt dropped by the lad as he leaped

from the wall. I kept the bow in hopes of finding the owner. It was marked

with a P. But I could not trace him; I had to leave Genoa, and have heard

nothing of him since. But to him I owe the improvements I have introduced

into my performance, for I never lost the impression of his music. I call

it a revelation: I owe to it the best part of my fame!"

I listened to the great artist with astonishment. Then I told him of the

strange, fitful resemblances I had found in his playing to that of the

stranger. Both of us cherish the hope that we shall yet discover him. So

mighty a genius must one day sway the world.

III.

Berlin, March 30, 1829.

After my long residence in the north, I returned here yesterday. It was

half-past eight when I had changed my travelling dress and dined. I asked

the butler if there was anything new at the theatre. "Nothing, _mein

Herr_," he replied. "But the concert is an attraction. There is a violin

player--"

"I have had enough of violin players."

"This one, sir, is called a wonder. See, in the paper, here, what the

critic--Rellstab--says of him."

"Never mind, I care little for the critic's praise. What is the name of

this wonderful performer?"

"His name? I will tell you directly. Strange--it has just gone out of my

head! He is an Italian--"

"An Italian?" I exclaimed, starting up.

"Yes--and the name .... it begins with a P."

"With a P! I must go instantly Where can I procure a ticket?"

"At the bureau opposite."

In a moment I had rushed across the street, and had the ticket.

At the door of the concert hall I found the crowd so great I could not

force my way in. I was compelled to stand outside with the others.

Gradually I edged myself nearer. The tutti of the last composition was

ended; the solo--apollacca--began.

{631}

The tones struck deep in my heart. I had heard them before; they were

unforgotten. But what a miracle! Do two play--or three? That I have never

heard. No, I could not trust my ears. If I might but see the player! but

gain one look! In vain! the crowd surged against the open door, yet none

could make way through the swaying mass. At least I could hear now--and I

lost not one note.

The music ceased, and a thunder-burst of applause shook the building. I

pressed forward again, striving to get a sight of the player; but others,

equally eager, pushed before me. I was again disappointed. With swelling

heart I waited, impatient to hear him commence again.

At last: "Now he plays on the G string," said some one near me. He began. I

was not deceived. That was the very melody I heard in prison! Those were

the self-same tones that once--calming, elevating, faith-inspiring, as if

sent direct from heaven--sent light into my gloomy soul!

With renewed efforts I forced my way into the hall. I saw once more the

pale, melancholy brow, the sunken eyes, the long, dark hair, the attenuated

cheeks, the enfeebled aspect of the whole person. It was HE! The mystery of

eighteen years was at length solved. The stranger who had so charmed my

soul, filling me with feelings unutterable--who had ceaselessly accompanied

me since, like a veiled phantom--familiar, yet from which I could not tear

the covering stood before me. I heard--I saw--PAGANINI!

------

Original.

Mary's Dirge.

By Carolus.

"Manibus date lilia plenis."

O THOU, whose awful mandate goes

Throughout a wondering world of woes,

Mysterious, still the same,

In moments such as this, we feel,

When grief is boundless, we must kneel

And bless THY holy name.

Ah, MARY! what avails thee now

Thy radiant eyes, thy classic brow,

And form of queenly mould;

The charms of polished culture's art,

Thy trusting, noble woman's heart,

Now pulseless, senseless, cold?

What now avails it to have stood,

In mind's keen conquest of the good,

Peerless among thy mates?

Or that a widowed mother wound,

Like NIOBE, her arms around

Her last, whom death awaits?

{632}

Alas! when heaven such gifts bestows,

It would, to earth-stained souls, disclose

A gleam of its own light,

But ere we learn how dear the prize,

All fades before our longing eyes,

Save sorrow, dreams, and night.

But where can friends so stricken find

A solace for the anguished mind,

Except in Him who sends

The grief that clouds, the joy that cheers,

The course of checkered, fleeting years.

And whilst he smites befriends?

As now I stand beside thy form,

So late in youth and beauty warm,

And sad, hushed vigil keep,

The eye would be as rayless grown,

As tearless, MARY, as thine own,

Could see--and could not weep.

Behold that lovely ruined shrine,

That marble waste where thought divine

Still seems to sit enthroned;

Those pallid lips whose every word,

Like sweet aëolian music heard,

A hymn to nature toned.

In pity, strew the virgin flower,

By virgin hands, in tender shower

Upon her virgin breast;

There sleeps she, purity's picked rose--

An angel snatched from earthly woes

To calm, eternal rest.

Though death's resistless, ruthless might

Sweeps beauty's loveliest forms from sight,

The soul retains her love,

And MARY'S spirit, ever near

The friends her young life cherished here,

Will lead their thoughts above.

Pittsburg, Jan. 21, 1867.

------

{633}

Abridged from the Dublin University Magazine.

Sir Thomas More.

Sir Thomas More did not account his own death an evil; not only, in his

last moments, did he mention the king with sweet loyalty, but he also

displayed a cheerfulness which has scandalized some writers. Holinshed, for

instance, charges him with having been "a jester and scoffer at the houre

of his death." This mirthful disposition of More's has made his character

an interesting subject of inquiry. But irreverence has nothing in common

with that genial tendency which Southey has called pantagruelism, and the

desirability of which he has advocated. For pantagruelism is not

buffoonery, levity, cynical insensibility; neither does it consist in mere

play of wit, intellectual tumbling, and playful freaks of fancy. Jests are

but its effects, the ripples, fitfully reflecting the sunlight on the

surface, and showing that the underlying mass is a running stream and not a

stagnant fen. Music and prayer are sisters; cheerfulness is the music of

life, and harmonizes human passions into rest; it is most consistent with

that holy creed, the apostle of which taught men to "rejoice evermore;" it

is an ascensional force, a verbum, as the old mystics would have said,

which carries the spirit upward, and turns human nature toward the bright

side of things. He who was the teacher of its outwardly most grotesque

aspect has by implication defined pantagruelism as a "marvellous contempt

and holding cheap of fortuitous things," (Introd. to Gargantua;) its basis

is a want of love for the things that are in the world; its effect is,

therefore, a sweet smile at the contrast, perpetual in this earthly life,

between aspirations and realities. Hence More's pleasantry, always harmless

and free from sarcasm--sparks issuing from a healthy and beautiful spirit.

Pantagruelism itself becomes linked, in some natures, to a gentle

melancholy, the sadness of the soul exiled from its eternal birthplace; in

northern minds especially is this solemnity of reverie frequent; More, to

whom religion was a daily food, evinced this dreamy pensiveness, side by

side with his mirth, from his youth to his death. It also seemed as if,

gifted with the sagacity of a Machiavel, but without craft, he had in the

most prosperous moments of his life a power of intuition which could divine

his fate, and thus cast a softening radiance over what to other men would

have appeared a most dazzling brightness of worldly success. Hence there is

in the expression of his features a sort of anxiety mixed with

cheerfulness; the penetrative and humorous nose is like that of Erasmus;

but the bony, caustic traits of the humorist have otherwise an expression

very different from the melancholy which tempers More's face, the open gray

eyes, that seem anxiously anticipating the future or contemplating

religious things, the lips that half project in that pouting way to be

noticed on many Saxon types of countenances.

When Henry VIII. ascended the throne, More ventured to express, in a poem

which attracted the royal favor, a conceit which was at once a criticism of

the past reign, a hope, and a foreboding for the future:

"So after six and thirty thousand year All things shal be the same which

once they were; After the Golden came the Silver age: Then came the

Brass, and Iron the last stage. The Golden age is revolv'd to your reign:

I now conceive that Plato did not feign."

From that time began the prosperity of More; but his previous life had been

both happy in a domestic capacity, and remarkable in a literary point of

view. He had already been an ascetic, a husband, and a poet.

{634}

As Disraeli remarks, "More in his youth was a true poet; but in his active

life he soon deserted these shadows of the imagination."

Whether in poetry or in prose, More was to fulfil Cardinal Morton's

observation, that "The child here waiting at table, whomever shall live to

see it, will prove a marvellous man." It was at the archbishop's that More

won his first spurs in wit, devising pageants and allegories. But while his

airy character early manifested itself, his early poems also reflect a vein

of ascetic thoughtfulness; as in the Ruful Lamentacion he wrote on the

death of Queen Elizabeth, mother to King Henry VIII:

"O ye that put your trust and confidence

In worldly joy and frayle prosperite,

That so lyve here as ye should never hence,

Remember death, and joke here uppon me.

Ensaumple, I thinke there may no better be.

Yourself wotte well that in this realme was I

Your quene but late, and lo, now here I lye.

"If worship myght have kept me, I had not gone;

If wyt myght have me saved, I neded not fere;

If money myght have helpe, I lacked none.

But, good God, what vayleth all this gere?

When deth is come, thy mighty messengere,

Obey we must there is no remedy.

Me hath he summoned, and now here I ly.

"Yet was I late promised otherwyse,

This yere to live in welth and delice.

Lo, whereto cometh thy blandishyng promyse,

O false astrology and devynatrice,

Of Goddes secrets makyng thyselfe so wyse.

How true is for this yere thy prophecy--

The yere yet lasteth, and lo, nowe here I ly."

Rhenanus, Brixius, Erasmus, commended his early poems; he was admitted

among the brotherhood of those who cultivated lettered lore. This was a

period of general renovation throughout Europe. For good or for evil, the

torch of knowledge had been lighted. Vocabularies and lexicons had reached

a fearful multiplication in Germany and Italy toward the close of the

fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. Nuremberg, Spires, Basil,

teemed with rudimentary treatises, dictionaries, and grammars; men were

feeding on Latin and Greek, studying eight or ten hours at a stretch.

England and Italy surpassed France in the literary movement; and Budé

complained that, in his countrymen's estimation, philological studies were

the hobbies of a few monomaniacs. More began his contributions to the

learning of the age by translating Lucian and Augustine's City of God.

Erasmus, in a letter to Hutten, described him as a unique genius in

England. But he gave his attention to religion no less than to literature.

"Erudition," Stapleton quaintly remarks, "however varied and extensive, is,

without piety, like a golden ring in the nostrils; there is nothing more

absurd than to set a precious jewel in a decaying piece of wood. Knowledge

is ill suited to a corrupt breast." To knowledge without goodness, Plato

had denied the name of wisdom, and given the inferior designation of

cleverness. But the youthful More was no less eager to attain piety than to

become proficient in learning. He manifested these aspirations according to

the tenets of his creed; he wore a hair-shirt, he slept on the bare floor,

his head resting on a wooden block; he restricted his hours of rest to four

or five at longest; acquainted with watchings and fastings, he nevertheless

made no ostentatious display of these and similar austerities--often, on

the other hand, concealing them under as conventional an appearance as it

was possible to bear.

Finding it useful to have some great man as an ideal, he translated Pico

della Mirandola's life. At that time, Colet, dean of St. Paul's, was

preaching in London; More derived much comfort from his friendship, and

compared himself to Eurydice following Orpheus, but in danger of falling

back into the realms of darkness. In a letter to the dean he thus

expatiates upon the annoyances of life in London: "The roofs intercept a

great portion of the light, and do not allow a free view of the sky. The

air is not bounded by the circle of the horizon, but by the housetops.

Therefore I the more willingly bear with you for not repenting of your

residence in the country, where you see good people around you, void of the

cunning of towns; where, whithersoever you turn your eyes, the bland face

of the earth delights you.

{635}

There you see nothing but the benignant gifts of nature, and, as it were,

the sacred vestiges of innocence." As for his literary study, Lilly and

Tonstall were his associates--Linacre and Grocinus his tutors. Now began

that series of friendships which he was through life always willing to

contract with educated men, such as Crooke, or Croke, one of the greatest

students of the sixteenth century, who wrangled at Leipzig, "de

dogmatibilitatibus" and other long things--schools then disputed on the

weight of Hercules's club and the size of Diogenes's tub--who taught Greek

to Henry VIII., and succeeded Erasmus in the chair of Greek at Cambridge;

Lee, who wrote against Erasmus; Fisher, who wrote sturdily against

reformers; Dorpius, who was shocked at the new classical studies, hearing

people swear "by Jove," and was desirous of limiting Grecian studies to the

works of Chrysostom and the Eastern fathers; Goclenius, who professed for

twenty years; Cornelius Crocus, who wrote Latin with Terentian elegance,

and became a Jesuit when fifty years old; Grynaeus, who taught Greek, who,

although a reformer, never insulted his antagonists and discovered six

books of Livy; Peter AEgidius, or Giles, whom Erasmus called a most

agreeable host, and who wrote a Greek lexicon while Luther was bewailing

his sins in a convent cell; Paulus Jovius, who spent twenty-seven years in

writing his Latin history, was esteemed by Leo. X. above Livy, and wanted a

great lady to send him some jam from Naples, because he was getting sick of

new-laid eggs; Vives, who was one of the literary triumvirs of the age, and

who, at his lectures at Corpus Christi College, was often applauded by

Henry and Queen Catherine. In the mean while he had, in a more practical

sphere, taken the virile gown, before practising as a barrister, and at

twenty-eight years of age been elected to the office of perpetual

"shyrevus" or sheriff. His business was to "administer justice" for the

subordinate sheriffs, "_pro istis shyrevis_" (Stapleton,) who were

incompetent in matters of law. While he was filling this office, a riot

took place in the city. For several years past there had been a great

increase of foreign workmen, to the great annoyance of the native working

classes. A popular preacher of the day, Dr. Bell, preached a sermon, in

which he urged the people to expel the foreign usurpers. Apprentices and

artisans, therefore, agreed that on the first of May, after business, there

should be a massacre of the foreigners. This trades' demonstration,

however, was baffled through the foresight of More. He issued an edict,

enjoining all well-disposed persons to stay within doors after nine o'clock

on the first of May. On that day there was no disturbance. A few days

after, however, several riotous crowds of working-men gathered in their

thousands, rushed to Newgate, and set free some tiny minorities of swains

who had been locked up for robbing, murdering, or otherwise annoying the

foreigners. Hour by hour they mustered in huger strength; angry shouts in

homeliest Saxon rang through the air; the whirligig was getting louder and

louder to one's ears. It seemed at one time rather hard to say how all this

would end. More, being loved by the town mob, tried to speak to the crowd

of small boys, big men, and roughs. Was it a Saturday night, that there

should be such noise in the streets? Did the working-men forget their duty?

They did; and it was at last needful to send for the red coats, who, with

queer-looking harquebuses, soon put the mob to flight. Thirteen ringleaders

were arrested and condemned to death; one only, however, was executed, the

others being saved through the intercession of three queens and the

influence of More.

In 1503 he was made a member of Parliament, and opposed a grant of money to

Henry VII. That monarch, who has been compared to Louis XI. of France, was

not to be bearded in this manner, and More was obliged to fly to the

continent.

{636}

But when Henry VIII. began his reign, More became the object of royal

favor. His literary talent and jovial mood were qualities too valuable not

to be appreciated by the king, who was surrounding himself with all

varieties of genius. Like Gargantua, the young king was athirst of all that

could adorn his court; More was therefore bound to the court by a golden

chain. He was made a knight, and one of the privy council. In return for

the royal favor he had to enliven the king with witty sayings, until this

yoke became almost too heavy for him. He had scarcely any time left for his

home enjoyments and his literary pursuits. In self-defence he was at last

driven to a kind of stratagem; he affected dulness, and tried as much as he

possibly could to become a bore. At last he succeeded and was allowed more

freedom and privacy.

At that period he resided in Chelsea, then a fashionable suburb. There Sir

Thomas lived in a semi-patriarchal fashion. So strict was he in religious

observances in his family that his house has been compared to a kind of

convent or religious abode. Meekness, order, industry characterized the

inmates. He set every one an example of gentleness and wisdom. Roper says

that, during sixteen years spent with Sir Thomas, he never saw the latter

in a "fume." A young lady who had been brought up in the family used to

behave badly for the sole purpose of being chid by More, whose gentle pity

and gravity were delightful to observe. In his second wife, Mrs. Alice

Middleton, who had an acrid and disagreeable temper, he had an opportunity

for taming a shrew, and had performed that feat with more credit to his

skill and patience than pleasantness to himself. He used to give his wife

and children plenty of sound ethical advice: "It is now no mastery

(difficulty) for you children to goe to heaven," he would say, "for

everybody giveth you good counsel and good example. You see virtue rewarded

and vice punished, so that you are carried up to heaven as it were by the

chins." He would encourage them to bear diseases and afflictions with

patience, and to resist the devil, whom he would compare to an ape--"for as

the ape, not well looked to, will be busie and bold to do shrewde turnes,

and contrarily being spyed and checkt for them, will suddenly leap back and

adventure no further; so the devil," etc. Thus at dinner and supper did he

entertain his family with high moral purpose; he allowed them, for their

recreation, to sing or to play on "violes." Some biographers allege that he

once cured his daughter of the sweating sickness. Ellis Haywood published

at Florence a little book called "Il Moro," in which many details are given

respecting the home life of More. Thus he is represented as entertaining

six guests at dinner. After the meal the party ascend the mound in the

garden, and, sitting on a greensward, they admire the meanderings of the

river, the hills undulating on the horizon, the turf and flowers of the

river side. His establishment, in its simplicity, greatly contrasted with

Wolsey's household, and its five hundred dependents, chancellors,

chaplains, doctors, ushers, valets, and others. More, however, a jester,

the middle-ages custom of keeping a "fool" not yet having been

discontinued. Henry VIII. had his Somers, Wolsey his Path, and More his

Patterson.

Sir Thomas was desirous of appropriating his leisure to the production of

some notable work. Already, while still unnoticed by Henry, he had written

a History of Richard III., in which he gave the following portrait of that

king:

"Ill fetured of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher than

his right, hard-favoured of visage ... he was malicious wrathful,

envious, and from afore his birth, ever frowarde. ... Hee was close and

secrete, a deepe dissimuler, lowlye of countenance, arrogaunt of heart,

outwardly coumpinable where he inwardly hated, not letting to kisse whome

hee thoughte to kyll; dispitious and cruell, not for evill well alway,

but after for ambition, and either for the suretee or encrease of his

estate. Frende and foo was muche what indifferent, where his advantage

grew; he spared no man's deathe whose life withstoode his purpose. He

slewe with his owne handes King Henry the Sixt, being prisoner in the

Tower, as menne constantly saye."

{637}

Shakespeare no doubt borrowed from this sketch some of the traits with

which he depicted the ambitious monarch. On the other hand, Horace Walpole,

in his "Historic Doubts," will have it that this history was written "from

a most corrupted source."

More now began to concentrate his energies for a work of more universal

interest. He became more abstemious than ever in his food and sleep; he

snatched as many hours as possible from his official pursuits, in order to

cultivate literature. The result of this labor was the famous "Utopia,"

composed in 1516. In a letter to Peter Giles or AEgidius, he describes the

manner in which that work was written: "After having been engaged in

pleading or hearing causes, either as judge or arbiter, there is left me

but scant opportunity for literature. I return home; I must talk with my

wife, amuse my children, confer of household affairs with my dependents. It

is necessary to do all this unless you are to be a stranger in your own

house. ... When therefore can I write? Neither have I mentioned the time

necessary for sleep or food." ... In fact he used at that time to rise at

two o'clock in the morning, writing till seven. Under these difficulties he

effected his purpose--he completed a work which won him a European

reputation.

Poets and philosophical dreamers react in their speculations against the

barrenness or terror of reality; and the more striking is this background,

the more impressive is the effect of the whole. More's book had an

appropriate practical contrast in the political circumstances of the time.

There were rumors of great wars; the Moslem emperor was threatening

Christendom. This fact, perhaps, not less than the intrinsic merit of the

book, explains the brilliant success of the "Utopia." Every educated man

read it. Morus [sic] was greatly delighted, and candidly gave expression to

his feelings. He was, he averred, more pleased with Tunstall's appreciation

than if he had received an Attic talent. Sometimes he fancied that his

Utopians were about to elect him their king for ever. In reality, he was

highly praised by AEgidius, Jovius, Busleyden, Paludanus, and others. The

new republic, these friendly critics averred, transcended the polity of

ancient Athens or Rome. A way had been shown toward the attainment of true

happiness. The book was a masterpiece of erudition, philosophy, knowledge

of the world. All this approbation was the more acceptable to More, that he

had been somewhat diffident concerning the reception of his work. In a

letter to Peter AEgidius, or Giles, of Antwerp, he had indulged in that

superciliousness toward the multitude which is the besetting temptation of

solitary thinkers. He complained of the discordances of criticism, the

small qualification of many for the exercise of lettered appreciation:

"The tastes of men are very different; some are of so morose a temper, so

sour a disposition, and make, such absurd judgments of things, that men

of cheerful and lively tempers, who indulge their genius, seem much more

happy than those who waste their time and strength in order to publishing

a book; which, though of itself it might be useful or pleasant, yet

instead of being well received, will be sure to be either laughed at or

censured. Many know nothing of learning, others despise it; a man that is

accustomed to a coarse and harsh style thinks everything is rough that is

not barbarous. Our trifling pretenders to learning think all is slight

that is not dress'd up in words that are worn out of use; some love only

old things, and many like nothing but what is their own. Some are so sour

that they can allow no jests, and others so dull that they can endure

nothing that is sharp; while some are as much afraid of anything gay and

lively, as a man with a mad dog is of water; others are so light and

unsettled, that their thoughts change as quick as they do their postures.

Some, again, when they meet in taverns, take upon them, among their cups,

to pass censures very freely on all writers, and with a supercilious

liberty to condemn everything they do not like; in which they have an

advantage, like that of a bald man, who can catch hold of another by the

hair, while the other cannot return the like upon him. They are safe, as

it were, from gunshot, since there is nothing in them solid enough to be

taken hold of; others are so unthankful, that even when they are well

pleased with a book, yet they think they owe nothing to the author."

{638}

Although More did meet with some of these ignorant or malevolent critics,

he must have been gratified at finding himself exalted into a modern Plato.

Nor was the praise he received partial or exaggerated. He had expressed the

leading idea of the time. Casting a general glance over the social field,

he had applied the newly arisen spirit of research and criticism to the

survey of society. Judging the actual, he had also evolved the ideal, which

the humanitarians of the age had more dimly viewed. Being a man of genius,

he had expressed a certain order of thought--concisely, but not the less

comprehensively--for all ages; and modern Positivists, Owenists,

Fourierists, and many other ists, might, from a study of the "Utopia,"

gather another illustration of the great truth that there is nothing new

under the sun.

The plan of the work is as follows: More supposes himself in Flanders, in

the capacity of ambassador to Charles the Fifth, and in the company of

"that incomparable man, Cuthbert Tonstal, whom the king, with such

universal applause, lately made master of the roles." At Antwerp, they

become acquainted with Peter Giles, or AEgidius, "a man of great honor and

of good rank in his town, though less than he deserves;" and they make

another acquaintance in this wise: "One day, as I was returning home from

mass at St. Mary's, which is the chief church, and the most frequented of

any in Antwerp, I saw him (Petrus AEgidius, or Giles) by accident, talking

with a stranger, who seemed past the flower of his age; his face was

tanned, he had a long beard, and his cloak was hanging carelessly about

him; so that by his looks and habits I concluded he was a seaman." This

ancient mariner, however, turns out to have travelled as an observer and

philosopher as well as a naval man; his name is Raphael Hythloday. He is a

Portuguese, who has travelled with Americus Vespucius. It is in

conversation with the stranger that More becomes acquainted with the

history and manners of the Utopians. In the first part of the book, Raphael

censures the polity of ordinary countries; he complains that "most princes

apply themselves more to affairs of war than to the useful arts of peace;

they are generally set more on acquiring new kingdoms, right or wrong, than

on governing well those they possess." Such opinions had a peculiar

pungency at a time when Selim was threatening to root out the Christian

name from Europe. Raphael criticises those in power, and their conservative

spirit; he betrays an implacable hostility toward those who "cover

themselves obstinately with this excuse, of reverence to past times;" he

had, he said, met with them chiefly in England, where he happened to be

when the rebellion in the west was suppressed, "with a great slaughter of

the poor people that were engaged in it." When relating his sojourn in

England, Raphael also indulges in the eulogy of that reverend prelate, John

Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury--in whose house More had been brought up--

"A man, Peter, (for Mr. More knows well what he was,) who was not less

venerable for his wisdom and virtues, for the high character he bore: he

was of a middle stature, not broke with age: his looks begot reverence

rather than fear; his conversation was easy, but serious and grave; he

sometimes took pleasure to try the force of those that came as suitors to

him upon business, by speaking sharply though decently to them, and by that

he discovered their spirit and presence of mind, with which he was much

delighted, when it did not grow up to impudence, as bearing a great

resemblance to his own temper, and he looked on such persons as the fittest

men for affairs.

{639}

He spoke both gracefully and weightily; he was eminently skilled in the

law; had a vast understanding, and a prodigious memory; and those excellent

talents with which nature had furnished him were improved by study and

experience. When I was in England, the king depended much on his councils,

and the government seemed to be chiefly supported by him; for from his

youth he had been all along practised in affairs; and, having passed

through many traverses of fortune, he had with great cost acquired a vast

stock of wisdom; which is not soon lost, when it is purchased so dear."

More's talent for keen observation and portraiture is also evinced in the

delightful sketch of the lawyer whom Raphael observes at Archbishop

Morton's. This gentleman "took occasion to run out in a high commendation

of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then

hanged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon

that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass that, since so

few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in

all places." Raphael, who in that nineteenth century which takes upon

itself to realize almost all the visions of dreamers, would have been a

zealous advocate for the abolition of capital punishment, objects that

"this way of punishing thieves was neither just in itself, nor good for the

public; for as the severity was too great, so the remedy was not effectual;

simple theft not being so great a crime that it ought to cost a man his

life; no punishment, how severe soever, being able to restrain those from

robbing who can find out no other way of livelihood. Not only you in

England, but a great part of the world, imitate some ill masters that are

readier to chastise their scholars than to teach them." Here is included

the modern fallacy about reforming criminals, which has been so much

insisted on, as if that reformation was so easy a task, as if so many

probabilities were not against it, as if it was not better for poor

criminals to be sent to a better world, than to be left open in this life

to almost irresistible temptations. However, that form of sentiment called

humanitarianism--which would spare the wicked and lost, while the honest

and useful are left to slow tortures, as in the case of merchant

sailors--that humanitarianism is continually displayed by this Raphael, in

a completeness and energy beyond which no later speculations have attained.

The lawyer maintains about the thieves that "there are many handicrafts,

and there is husbandry, by which they may make a shift to live, unless they

have a greater mind to follow ill courses;" and Raphael's rejoinder

discloses a state of things which was not very well calculated to make the

army popular: "That will not serve your turn, for many lose their limbs in

civil or foreign wars, as lately in the Cornish rebellion, and some time

ago in your wars with France, who, being thus mutilated in the service of

their king and country, can no more follow their old trades, and are too

old to learn new ones. He owns, however, that wars do not occur every day.

The following opinion of his may be advantageously recommended to the

careful study of enlightened and disinterested democrats, who, by the

magical power of their thought, can amplify it, transmogrify it, intensify

it for the benefit of their country's flesh and blood: "There is a great

number of noblemen among you, that are themselves as idle as drones; that

subsist on other men's labors, on the labor of their tenants, whom, to

raise their revenues, they pare to the quick." Applying this to his theory

of thieves, Hythlodoeus says that these noblemen keep a great number of

servants who, on their master's death, are turned out of doors and betake

themselves to larceny. The lawyer, in nowise disconcerted, answers that

these tatterdemalions, constitute a capital recruiting-ground for the army.

Raphael retorts that a converse metamorphosis of efficient soldiers into

able robbers is liable to take place.

{640}

He also inveighs against France for keeping up a ruinous military

establishment: "But this bad custom, so common among you, of keeping many

servants, is not peculiar to this nation. In France there is yet a more

pestiferous sort of people; for the whole country is full of soldiers,

still kept up in time of peace, if such a state of a nation can be called

peace; and these are kept in pay upon the same account that you plead for

those idle retainers about noblemen, this being a maxim of those pretended

statesmen, that it is necessary for the public safety to have a good body

of veteran soldiers ever in readiness. They think raw men are not to be

depended upon, and they sometimes seek occasions for making war, that they

may train up their soldiers in the art of cutting throats; or, as Sallust

observed, for keeping their hands in use, that they may not grow dull by

too long an intermission. But France has learned to its cost how dangerous

it is to feed such beasts. The fate of the Romans, Carthaginians, and

Syrians, and many other nations and cities, which were both overturned and

quite ruined by those standing armies, should make others wiser." And

Hythloday in his enthusiasm adds a stinging taunt, the truth of which,

however, subsequent agitations and rebellions have not confirmed: "Every

day's experience shows that the mechanics in the towns or the clowns in the

country are not afraid of fighting with those idle gentlemen." He further

attributes the great number of thieves to the increase of pasture, "by

which your sheep, which are naturally mild and easily kept in order, may be

said now to devour men and unpeople not only villages, but towns;" land was

enclosed, tenants turned away, and Hythlodoeus points out a cattle plague

among the results of this state of things, adding somewhat fiercely: "To us

it might have seemed more just had it fell on the owners themselves." He

does not seem to perceive that by this enclosure the land is saved from

that exhaustion which must ultimately reduce Europe to a barren state, and

thus annihilate civilization; but humanitarianism was never remarkable for

excess of foresight. The lawyer is about to reply in a speech divided into

four points, but the humane archbishop interferes, and "eases him of the

trouble of answering;" unfortunately, however, or perhaps from a relish for

humor, he allows Raphael to indulge in a long speech on the reasons against

putting thieves to death. Hythloday recommends a punishment which no

sensible thief would prefer to death, namely, that the criminal should be

made to work all his life in quarries or mines. But as this was the ancient

Roman method, it is not perfect enough for the ingenious Raphael, who would

much prefer a scheme according to which the thieves are let loose in the

daytime, engaged in working for the public; and, although liable to be

whipped for idleness, these debonair convicts punctually return to prison

every evening, and answer to their names before being locked up for the

night. The reformer adds somewhat naively, "the only danger to be feared

from them is their conspiring against the government." The unfortunate

lawyer, rather taken aback at the idea of London being full of convicts

with cropped ears and a peculiar dress, playing the part of commissionaires

or otherwise making themselves generally useful to Londoners, says that he

fears this could not take place without the whole nation being endangered;

the sensible cardinal avoids this slight exaggeration, and answers with

quiet irony that it is not easy to form a judgment with respect to the

success of this scheme, since it is a method that has never yet been tried.

If, in this exquisite scene, which evinces such dramatic genius, there is

any trace of a lyrical element, this is most likely to be found in the

cardinal's verdict, who is confessedly the most honored and reverend

personage, and withal one with a real prototype. There is no reason to

suppose that Morus was a Hythloday; of course, reflecting the thoughts of

his age, he had entertained similar ideas; but instead of petrifying them

in his mind, he vaporized them, dramatized them, as it were, in the

character of Hythloday, contemplated their embodiment or type in an

objective, extraneous form, and thus remained, as to his inner self,

impartial and moderate.

{641}