Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 2 (of 8) / Spanish Explorations and Settlements in America from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century

by Unknown

CHAPTER II.

AMERIGO VESPUCCI.

BY SYDNEY HOWARD GAY

AMERIGO VESPUCCI,[448] the third son of Nastugio Vespucci, a notary of Florence, and his wife Lisabetta Mini, was born on the 9th of March, 1451. The family had the respectability of wealth, acquired in trade, for one member of it in the preceding century was rich enough to endow a public hospital. Over the portal of the house, so dedicated to charity by this pious Vespucci nearly three quarters of a century before Amerigo was born, there was, says Humboldt, engraved in 1719, more than three hundred years after the founding of the hospital, an inscription declaring that here Amerigo had lived in his youth. As the monks, however, who wrote the inscription also asserted in it that he was the discoverer of America, it is quite possible that they may have been as credulous in the one case as in the other, and have accepted for fact that which was only tradition. But whether Amerigo’s father, Nastugio, lived or did not live in the hospital which his father or grandfather founded, he evidently maintained the respectability of the family. Three of his sons he sent to be educated at the University of Pisa. Thenceforth they are no more heard of, except that one of them, Jerome, afterward went to Palestine, where he remained nine years, met with many losses, and endured much suffering,—all of which he related in a letter to his younger brother Amerigo. But the memory even of this Jerome—that he should have ever gone anywhere, or had any adventures worth the telling—is only preserved from oblivion because he had this brother who became the famous navigator, and whose name by a chance was given to half the globe.

A LETTER OF VESPUCIUS TO HIS FATHER (after a fac-simile given by Varnhagen).

[Harrisse (Bibl. Amer. Vet., Additions, p. xxii) says that this letter was found by Bandini in the Strozzi Library, and that it is now in the collection of M. Feuillet de Conches in Paris. “This and two or three signatures added to receipts, which were brought to light by Navarrete, constitute,” said Harrisse in 1872, “the only autographs of Vespucius known.” Since then another fac-simile of a letter by Vespucius has been published in the Cartas de Indias, being a letter of Dec. 9, 1508, about goods which ought to be carried to the Antilles. Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xvi. 318, and Magazine of American History, iii. 193, where it is translated, and accompanied by a fac-simile of a part of it. The signature is given on another page of the present chapter.—Ed.]

Amerigo was not sent to the university. Such early education as he received came from a learned uncle, Giorgi Antonio Vespucci, a Dominican friar, who must have been a man of some influence in Florence, as it is claimed for him that he was the friend and colleague of the more famous monk Savonarola. The nephew acknowledged later in life that he was not among the most diligent of his uncle’s pupils; and the admission was as true as it was ingenuous, if one may judge by a letter in Latin written, when he was twenty-five years old, to his father. He excuses himself to that spectabili et egregio viro—as he addresses his father—for recent negligence in writing, as he hesitates to commit himself in Latin without the revision of his uncle, and he happens to be absent. Probably it was poverty of expression in that tongue, and not want of thought, which makes the letter seem the work of a boy of fifteen rather than of a young man of five and twenty. A mercantile career in preference to that of a student was, at any rate, his own choice; and in due time, though at what age precisely does not appear, a place was found for him in the great commercial house of the Princes Medici in Florence.

In Florence he remained, apparently in the service of the Medici, till 1490; for in that year he complains that his mother prevented him from going to Spain. But the delay was not long, as in January, 1492, he writes from Cadiz, where he was then engaged in trade with an associate, one Donato Nicolini,—perhaps as agents of the Medici, whose interests in Spain were large. Four years later, the name of Vespucci appears for the first time in the Spanish archives, when he was within two months of being forty-six years of age. Meanwhile he had engaged in the service of Juonato Berardi, a Florentine merchant established at Seville, who had fitted out the second expedition of Columbus in 1493.[449]

It has been conjectured that Vespucci became known at that time to Columbus,—which is not improbable if the former was so early as 1493 in the service of Berardi. But the suggestion that he went with Columbus either on his first or second expedition cannot be true, at any rate as to the second.[450] For in 1495 Berardi made a contract with the Spanish Government to furnish a fleet of ships for an expedition westward which he did not live to complete. Its fulfilment was intrusted to Vespucci; and it appears in the public accounts that a sum of money was paid to him from the Treasury of the State in January, 1496. Columbus was then absent on his second voyage, begun in September, 1493, from which he did not return till June, 1496.

In the interval between the spring of 1495 and the summer of 1497 any adventurer was permitted by Spain, regardless of the agreement made with Columbus, to go upon voyages of commerce or discovery to that New India to which his genius and courage had led the way. “Now,” wrote Columbus, “there is not a man, down to the very tailors, who does not beg to be allowed to become a discoverer.” The greed of the King; the envy of the navigators who before 1492 had laughed at the theories of Columbus; the hatred of powerful Churchmen, more bitter now than ever, because those theories which they had denounced as heresy had proved to be true,—all these influences were against him, and had combined to rob the unhappy Admiral, even before he had returned from his second voyage, of the honor and the riches which he thought would rightfully become his own. Ships now could go and come in safety over that wide waste of waters which even children could remember had been looked upon as a “Sea of Darkness,” rolling westward into never-ending space, whence there was no return to the voyager mad enough to trust to its treacherous currents. It was no longer guarded by perpetual Night, by monsters hideous and terrible, and by a constant wind that blew ever toward the west. But ships came safely back, bringing, not much, but enough of gold and pearls to seem an earnest of the promise of the marvellous wealth of India that must soon be so easily and so quickly reached; with the curious trappings of a picturesque barbarism; the soft skins and gorgeous feathers of unknown beasts and birds; the woods of a new beauty in grain and vein and colors; the aromatic herbs of subtle virtue that would stir the blood beneath the ribs of Death; and with all these precious things the captive men and women, of curious complexion and unknown speech, whose people were given as a prey to the stranger by God and the Pope. Every rough sailor of these returning ships was greeted as a hero when to the gaping, wide-eyed crowd he told of his adventures in that land of perpetual summer, where the untilled virgin soil brought forth its fruits, and the harvest never failed; where life was without care or toil, sickness or poverty; where he who would might gather wealth as he would idly pick up pebbles on a beach. These were the sober realities of the times; and there were few so poor in spirit or so lacking in imagination as not to desire to share in the possession of these new Indies. It was not long, indeed, before a reaction came; when disappointed adventurers returned in poverty, and sat in rags at the gates of the palace to beg relief of the King. And when the sons of Columbus, who were pages in the Court of the Queen, passed by, “they shouted to the very heavens, saying: ‘Look at the sons of the Admiral of Mosquitoland!—of that man who has discovered the lands of deceit and disappointment,—a place of sepulchre and wretchedness to Spanish hidalgos!’”[451]

From his second voyage Columbus returned in the summer of 1496; and meeting his enemies with the courage and energy which never failed him, he induced the King and Queen to revoke, in June of the next year, the decree of two years before. Meanwhile he made preparations for his third voyage, on which he sailed from San Lucar on the 30th of May, 1498. Two months later he came in sight of the island he named Trinidad; and entering the Gulf of Paria, into which empties the Orinoco by several mouths, he sailed along the coast of the mainland. He had reached the continent, not of Asia, as he supposed, but of the western hemisphere. None of the four voyages of the great discoverer is so illustrative of his peculiar faith, his religious fervor, and the strength of his imagination as this third voyage; and none, in that respect, is so interesting. The report of it which he sent home in a letter, with a map, to the King and Queen has a direct relation to the supposed first voyage of Amerigo Vespucci.

As he approached the coast, Columbus wrote,[452] he heard “in the dead of night an awful roaring;” and he saw “the sea rolling from west to east like a mountain as high as the ship, and approaching little by little; on the top of this rolling sea came a mighty wave roaring with a frightful noise.” When he entered the Gulf, and saw how it was filled by the flow of the great river, he believed that he had witnessed far out at sea the mighty struggle at the meeting of the fresh with the salt water. The river, he was persuaded, must be rushing down from the summit of the earth, where the Lord had planted the earthly Paradise, in the midst whereof was a fountain whence flowed the four great rivers of the world,—the Ganges, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile. He did not quite agree with those earlier philosophers who believed that the earth was a perfect sphere; but rather that it was like “the form of a pear, which is very round except where the stalk grows, at which part it is most prominent; or like a round ball, upon one part of which is a prominence like a woman’s nipple, this protrusion being the highest and nearest the sky, situated under the equinoctial line, and at the eastern extremity of this sea.” “I call that the eastern extremity,” he adds, “where the land and the islands end.”

Now had come to him at last in the observations and experience of this voyage the confirmation of his faith. That “eastern extremity of the sea where the lands and the islands end” he had reached, he thought, at the islands of Trinidad, of Margarita, and of Cubagua, and at the coast of the Gulf of Paria, into which poured this great river rushing down from the pinnacle of the globe. For he had observed, as he sailed westward from a certain line in the ocean, that “the ships went on rising smoothly towards the sky.” Some of the older astronomers, he said, believed that the Arctic pole was “the highest point of the world, and nearest to the heavens;” and others that this was true of the Antarctic. Though all were wrong as to the exact locality of that elevation, it was plain that they held a common faith that somewhere there was a point of exaltation, if only it could be found, where the earth approached the sky more nearly than anywhere else. But it had not occurred to any of them that possibly the blessed spot which the first rays of the sun lit up in crimson and in gold on the morning of creation, because it was the topmost height of the globe, and because it was in the east, might be under the equinoctial line; and it had not occurred to them, because this eastern extremity of the world, which it had pleased God he should now discover, had hitherto been unknown to civilized man.

Every observation and incident of this voyage gave to Columbus proof of the correctness of his theory. The farther south he had gone along the African coast, the blacker and more barbarous he had found the people, the more intense the heat, and the more arid the soil. For many days they had sailed under an atmosphere so heated and oppressive that he doubted if his ships would not fall to pieces and their crews perish, if they did not speedily escape into some more temperate region. He had remarked in former voyages that at a hundred leagues west of the Azores there was a north-and-south line, to cross which was to find an immediate and grateful change in the skies above, in the waters beneath, and in the reviving temperature of the air. The course of the ships was altered directly westward, that this line might be reached, and the perils escaped which surrounded him and his people. It was when the line was crossed that he observed how his ships were gently ascending toward the skies. Not only were the expected changes experienced, but the North Star was seen at a new altitude; the needle of the compass varied a point, and the farther they sailed the more it turned to the northwest. However the wind blew, the sea was always smooth; and when the Island of Trinidad and the shores of the continent were reached, they entered a climate of exceeding mildness, where the fields and the foliage were “remarkably fresh and green, and as beautiful as the gardens of Valencia in April.” The people who crowded to the shore “in countless numbers” to gaze at these strange visitors were “very graceful in form, tall, and elegant in their movements, wearing their hair very long and smooth.” They were, moreover, of a whiter skin than any the Admiral had heretofore seen “in any of the Indies,” and were “shrewd, intelligent, and courageous.”

The more he saw and the more he reflected, the more convinced he was that this country was “the most elevated in the world, and the nearest to the sky.” Where else could this majestic river, that rushed eagerly to this mighty struggle with the sea, come from, but from that loftiest peak of the globe, in the midst whereof was the inexhaustible fountain of the four great rivers of the earth? The faith or the fanaticism—whichever one may please to call it—of the devout cosmographer was never for an instant shadowed by a doubt. The human learning of all time had taught him that the shorter way to India must be across that western ocean which, he was persuaded, covered only one third of the globe and separated the western coast of Europe from the eastern coast of Asia. When it was taken for granted that his first voyage had proved this geographical theory to be the true one, then he could only understand that as in each successive voyage he had gone farther, so he was only getting nearer and nearer to the heart of the empire of the Great Khan.

But to the aid of human knowledge came a higher faith; he was divinely led. In writing of this third voyage to Dona Juana de la Torres, a lady of the Court and a companion to the Queen, he said: “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse by Saint John, after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah; and he showed me the spot where to find it.”[453]. The end of the world he believed was at hand; by which he meant, perhaps, only the world of heathenism and unbelief. In his letter to the sovereigns he said that “it was clearly predicted concerning these lands by the mouth of the prophet Isaiah in many places in Scripture, that from Spain the holy name of God was to be spread abroad.” Amazing and even fantastic as his conclusions were when they came from the religious side of his nature, they were to him irrefragable, because they were so severely logical. He was the chosen instrument of the divine purpose, because it was to him that the way had been made straight and plain to the glorious East, where God had planted in the beginning the earthly Paradise, in which he had placed man, where man had first sinned, and where ere long was to break the promised dawn of the new heaven and the new earth.

The northern continent of the New World was discovered by the Cabots a year before the southern mainland was reached by Columbus. Possibly this northern voyage may have suggested to the geographers of England a new theory, as yet, so far as we know, not thought of in Spain and Portugal,—that a hemisphere was to be circumnavigated, and a passage found among thousands of leagues of islands, or else through some great continent hitherto unknown,—except to a few forgotten Northmen of five hundred years earlier,—before India could be reached by sailing westward. In speaking of this voyage long afterward, Sebastian Cabot said: “I began to saile toward the northwest, not thinking to find any other land than that of Cathay, and from thence turne toward India; but after certaine dayes I found that the land ranne towards the North, which was to mee a great displeasure.”[454] This may have been the afterthought of his old age, when the belief that the new Indies were the outlying boundaries of the old was generally discarded. He had forgotten, as the same narrative shows,—unless the year be a misprint,—the exact date of that voyage, saying that it “was, as farre as I remember, in the yeare 1496, in the beginning of Summer.” This was a year too soon. But if the statement be accepted as literally true that he was disappointed in finding, not Cathay and India, as he had hoped, but another land, then not only the honor of the discovery of the western continent belongs to his father and to him,—or rather to the father alone, for the son was still a boy,—but the further distinction of knowing what they had discovered; while Columbus never awoke from the delusion that he had touched the confines of India.

A discussion of the several interesting questions relating to the voyages of the Cabots belongs to another chapter;[455] but assuming here that the voyage of the “Mathew” from Bristol, England, in the summer of 1497, is beyond controversy, the precedence of the Cabots over Columbus in the discovery of the continent may be taken for granted. There is other ample evidence besides his curious letters to show that the latter was on the coast of South America in the summer of 1498, just thirteen months and one week after the Cabots made the terra primum visa, whether on the coast of Nova Scotia, Labrador, or possibly Newfoundland.[456] Not that this detracts in any degree, however slight, from the great name of Columbus as the discoverer of the New World. Of him Sebastian Cabot was mindful to say, in conversation with the Pope’s envoy in Spain,—just quoted from in the preceding paragraph,—that “when newes were brought that Don Christopher Colonus, Genoese, had discovered the coasts of India, whereof was great talke in all the Court of King Henry the 7, who then raigned, insomuch that all men with great admiration affirmed it to be a thing more divine than humane to saile by the West into the Easte, where spices growe, by a map that was never knowen before,—by this fame and report there increased in my heart a great flame of desire to attempt some notable thing.” However notable the thing might be, it could be only secondary to that achievement of Columbus which Cabot looked upon as “more divine than human;” but whether in the first sight of the mainland which all hoped to find beyond the islands already visited, Vespucci did not take precedence both of the Cabots and of Columbus, has been a disputed question for nearly four hundred years; and it will probably never be considered as satisfactorily settled, should it continue in dispute for four hundred years longer.

The question is, whether Vespucci made four voyages to that half of the world which was ever after to bear his name,[457] and whether those voyages were really made at the time it is said they were. The most essential point, however, is that of the date of the first voyage: for if that which is asserted to be the true date be correct, the first discoverer of the western continent was neither the Cabots nor Columbus, but Vespucci; and his name was properly enough bestowed upon it. “In the year 1497,” says an ancient and authentic Bristol manuscript,[458] “the 24th June, on St. John’s day, was Newfoundland found by Bristol men [the Cabots] in a ship called the ‘Mathew.’” On his third voyage, in 1498, Columbus says: “We saw land [Trinidad] at noon of Tuesday the 31st of July.” In a letter, written no doubt by Vespucci, he says: “We sailed from the port of Cadiz on the 10th of May, 1497;”[459] and after leaving the Canaries, where the four ships of the expedition remained a few days to take in their final supplies of wood, water, and provisions, they came, he continues, “at the end of twenty-seven days, upon a coast which we thought to be that of a continent.” Of these dates the first two mentioned are unquestionably authentic. If that last given were equally so, there would be an end of all controversy upon the subject; for it would prove that Vespucci’s discovery of the continent preceded that of the Cabots, though only by a week or two, while it must have been earlier than that of Columbus by about fourteen months.

It should first of all be noted that the sole authority for a voyage made by Vespucci in 1497 is Vespucci himself. All contemporary history, other than his own letter, is absolutely silent in regard to such a voyage, whether it be history in printed books, or in the archives of those kingdoms of Europe where the precious documents touching the earlier expeditions to the New World were deposited. Santarem, in his Researches, goes even farther than this; for he declares that even the name of Vespucci is not to be found in the Royal Archives of Portugal, covering the period from 1495 to 1503, and including more than a hundred thousand documents relating to voyages of discovery; that he is not mentioned in the Diplomatic Records of Portugal, which treat of the relations of that kingdom with Spain and Italy, when one of the duties of ambassadors was to keep their Governments advised of all new discoveries; and that among the many valuable manuscripts belonging to the Royal Library at Paris, he, M. Santarem, sought in vain for any allusion to Vespucci. But these assertions have little influence over those who do not agree with Santarem that Vespucci was an impostor. The evidence is overwhelming that he belonged to some of the expeditions sent out at that period to the southwest; and if he was so obscure as not to be recognized in any contemporary notices of those voyages, then it could be maintained with some plausibility that he might have made an earlier voyage about which nothing was known. And this would seem the more probable when it was remembered that the time (1497) of this alleged expedition was within that interval when “the very tailors,” as Columbus said, might go, without let or hindrance, in search of riches and renown in the new-found world.

AUTOGRAPH OF VESPUCIUS, 1508.

[This is the conclusion of a letter of Vespucius, printed and given in fac-simile in the Cartas de Indias.—Ed.]

Nevertheless, the fact of the obscurity of Vespucci at that period is not without great weight, though Santarem fails in his attempt to prove too much by it. Columbus believed when, on his second voyage, he coasted the southern shore of Cuba, that he had touched the continent of Asia. The extension of that continent he supposed, from indications given by the natives, and accepted by him as confirming a foregone conclusion, would be found farther south; and for that reason he took that course on his third voyage. “The land where the spices grow” was now the aim of all Spanish energy and enterprise; and it is not likely that this theory of the Admiral was not well understood among the merchants and navigators who took an intelligent as well as an intense interest in all that he had done and in all that he said.

VESPUCIUS.[460]

Is it probable, then, that nobody should know of the sailing of four ships from Cadiz for farther and more important discoveries in the direction pointed out by Columbus? Or, if their departure was secret, can there be a rational doubt that the return, with intelligence so important and generally interesting, would have been talked about in all the ports of Spain, and the man who brought it have become instantly famous?

VESPUCIUS.

[A sketch of an old engraving as given in the Allgem. geog. Ephemeriden (Weimar, 1807), vol. xxiii. There are other engravings of it in Jules Verne’s Découverte de la terre, and elsewhere.—Ed.]

But as no account of the voyage appeared till years afterward, and then in a letter from Vespucci himself; and as, meanwhile, for most of those years the absence of his name from contemporary records shows that no celebrity whatever was attached to it,—the logical conclusion is, not only that the voyage was unknown, but that it was unknown because it was never made. Moreover, if it was ever made it could not have been unknown, if we may trust Vespucci’s own statement. For in his letter—not written till 1504, and not published in full till 1507—he said that this expedition was sent out by order of King Ferdinand; that he, Vespucci, went upon it by royal command; and that after his return he made a report of it to the King. The expedition, therefore, was clearly not one of those which, in the interval between the summers of 1495 and 1497, so often referred to, escaped all public record; and as there cannot be found any recognition of such an enterprise at that date either in contemporaneous history or State documents, what other conclusion can be accepted as rational and without prejudice, than that no such voyage so commanded was made at that time?

VESPUCIUS.

[A fac-simile of the engraving in Montanus, copied in Ogilby, p. 60.—Ed.]

There seems to be no escape from this evidence, though it is so purely negative and circumstantial. But Humboldt, relying upon the researches of the Spanish historian Muñoz, and upon those gathered by Navarrete in his Coleccion de los viages y descubrimientos, presents the proof of an alibi for Vespucci. As has been already said on a previous page, the fact is unquestioned that Vespucci, who had been a resident of Spain for some time, became in 1495 a member of the commercial house of Juanoto Berardi, at Seville, and that in January of the next year, as the public accounts show, he was paid a sum of money relative to a contract with Government which Berardi did not live to complete. The presumption is that he would not soon absent himself from his post of duty, where new and onerous responsibilities had been imposed upon him by the recent death of the senior partner of the house with which he was connected. But at any rate he is found there in the spring of 1497, Muñoz having ascertained that fact from the official records of expenses incurred in fitting out the ships for western expeditions, still preserved at Seville. Those records show that from the middle of April, 1497, to the end of May, 1498, Vespucci was busily engaged at Seville and San Lucar in the equipment of the fleet with which Columbus sailed on his third voyage. The alibi, therefore, is complete. Vespucci could not have been absent from Spain from May, 1497, to October, 1498,—the period of his alleged first voyage.

All this seems incontrovertible, and should be accepted as conclusive till fresh researches among the archives of that age shall show, if that be possible, that those hitherto made have been either misunderstood or are incomplete. Assuming the negative to be proved, then, as to the alleged date of Vespucci’s first voyage, the positive evidence, on the other hand, is ample and unquestioned, that Columbus sailed from San Lucar on his third voyage on the 30th of May, 1498, and two months later reached the western continent about the Gulf of Paria.

Was Vespucci then a charlatan? Was he guilty of acts so base as a falsification of dates, and narratives of pretended voyages, that he might secure for himself the fame that belonged to another,—that other, moreover, being his friend? There are reasons for believing this to be quite true of him; and other reasons for not believing it at all. There is not, to begin with, a scrap of original manuscript of his bearing on this point known to exist; it is not even positively known in what tongue his letters were written; and anything, therefore, like absolute proof as to what he said he did or did not do, is clearly impossible. The case has to be tried upon circumstantial evidence and as one of moral probabilities; and the verdict must needs differ according to the varying intelligence and disposition of different juries.

He made, or he claimed to have made,—assuming the letters attributed to him to be his,—four voyages, of each of which he wrote a narrative. According to the dates given in these letters, he twice sailed from Spain by order of Ferdinand,—in May, 1497, and in May, 1499; and twice from Portugal, in the service of King Emanuel,—in May, 1501, and in May, 1503. He was absent, as we learn from the same letters, about seventeen months on the first voyage, about sixteen each on the second and third, and on the fourth eleven months. If he went to sea, then, for the first time in May, 1497, and the last voyage ended, as the narrative says, in June, 1504, the whole period of his seafaring life was eighty-four months, of which sixty were passed at sea, and twenty-four, at reasonable intervals, on shore. As the dates of departure and of return are carefully given, obviously the period from May, 1497, to June, 1504, must be allowed for the four expeditions. But here we come upon an insurmountable obstacle. If to the first voyage of 1497 the wrong date was given,—if, that is, the actual first voyage was that of 1499, which Vespucci calls his second,—then he could not have gone upon four expeditions. From May, 1499, to June, 1504, is a period of sixty months; and as the aggregate length he gives to the assumed four voyages is sixty months, they could not have been made in that time, as that would have compelled him to be at sea the whole five years, with no interval of return to Spain or Portugal to refit,—which is manifestly absurd.

The solution of the difficulty relied upon by Humboldt and others seems, therefore, insufficient; it is not explained by assuming that the date 1497 in the narrative of the first voyage was the careless blunder of the translator, copyist, or printer of Vespucci’s original letter. It is not an error if there were four voyages; for as the date of the last one is undisputed, the date of 1497 for the first one must remain to give time enough for the whole. But that there were four voyages does not depend solely upon the date given to the first one. That there were four—“quatuor navigationes”—is asserted repeatedly by Vespucci in the different letters. In the relation of the first one, wherein is given this troublesome date which has so vexed the souls of scholars, he says at some length that as he had seen on these “twice two” voyages so many strange things, differing so much from the manners and customs of his own country, he had written a little book, not yet published, to be called “Four Expeditions, or Four Voyages,” in which he had related, to the best of his ability, about all he had seen.[461] If, then, the date 1497 is to be explained away as the result of carelessness or accident,—even admitting that such an explanation would explain,—what is to be done with this passage? It cannot, like a single numeral—a 7 for a 9—be attributed to chance; and it becomes necessary, therefore, to regard it as an interpolation contrived to sustain a clumsy falsification of date.

It has also been conjectured that two of the letters have been misapprehended; that Vespucci meant one as only a continuation of the other in a description of a single voyage, or if intended as two letters, they were meant to describe the same voyage. The early editors, it has been suggested, supposing that each letter described a separate voyage, forged or changed the dates in accordance with that supposition. If there were no other objection to this theory, it is untenable if what has just been said be true. The duration of each voyage, the aggregate length of the whole, and the distinct and careful assertion that there were four of them, require that there should be one prior to that which Vespucci calls his second.

All this leads, according to our present knowledge of the facts, inevitably to this conclusion,—whether Vespucci himself wrote, or others wrote for him, these letters, their very consistency of dates and of circumstantial assertion show them to have been deliberately composed to establish a falsehood. For the researches of Muñoz and of Navarrete, as is said above, prove that Vespucci could not have sailed from Spain on his first voyage on the 10th or 20th of May, 1497; for from the middle of April of that year to the end of May, 1498, he was busily employed at Seville and San Lucar in fitting out the fleet for the third expedition of Columbus.

There is other evidence, negative indeed, but hardly less conclusive, that this assumed voyage of 1497 was never made. In 1512 Don Diego Columbus brought an action against the Crown of Spain to recover, as the heir of his father, Christopher Columbus, the government and a portion of the revenues of certain provinces on the continent of America. The defence was that those countries were not discovered by Columbus, and the claim, therefore, was not valid. It is not to be supposed that the Crown was negligent in the search for testimony to sustain its own cause, for nearly a hundred witnesses were examined. But no evidence was offered to prove that Vespucci—whose nephew was present at the trial—visited in 1497 the Terra Firma which the plaintiff maintained his father discovered in 1498. On the other hand, Alonzo de Ojeda, an eminent navigator, declared that he was sent on an expedition in 1499 to the coast of Paria next after it was discovered by the Admiral (Columbus); and that “in this voyage which this said witness made, he took with him Juan de la Cosa and Morigo Vespuche [Amerigo Vespucci] and other pilots.”[462] When asked how he knew that Columbus had made the discovery at the time named, his reply was that he knew it because the Bishop Fonseca had supplied him with that map which the Admiral had sent home in his letter to the King and Queen. The act of the Bishop was a dishonorable one, and intended as an injury to Columbus; and to this purpose Ojeda further lent himself by stopping at Hispaniola on the return from his voyage, and by exciting there a revolt against the authority of the Admiral in that island. Perhaps the bitter animosity of those years had been buried in the grave of the great navigator, together with the chains which had hung always in his chamber as a memento of the royal ingratitude; but even in that case it is not likely that Ojeda would have lost such an opportunity to justify, in some degree, his own conduct by declaring, if he knew it to be so, that Columbus was not the first discoverer of the continent. It is of course possible, but it is certainly not probable, that he should not have heard from Vespucci that this was his second visit to the Gulf of Paria, if that were the fact, and that his first visit was a year before that of Columbus, whose chart Ojeda was using to direct his course through seas with which Vespucci was familiar. This reasonable reflection is dwelt upon by Humboldt, Irving, and others; and it comes with peculiar force to the careful reader of the letters of Vespucci, for he was never in the least inclined to hide his light under a bushel.

The originals of the letters, as has already been said, are not, so far as is known, in existence; it is even uncertain whether they were written in Latin, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese. Nor has the book which Vespucci said he had prepared—“The Four Voyages”—ever been found; but Humboldt believed that the collected narrative first published at St.-Dié in 1507, in the Cosmographiæ introductio of Hylacomylus, was made up of extracts from that book. This St.-Dié edition was in Latin, translated, the editor says, from the French.[463] There is in the British Museum a rare work of four pages, published also in 1507, the author of which was Walter Lud. This Lud was the secretary of the Duke of Lorraine, a canon of the St.-Dié Cathedral, and the founder of the school or college, where he had set up a printing-press on which was printed the Cosmographiæ introductio. From this little book it is learned that the Vespucci letters were sent from Portugal to the Duke of Lorraine in French, and that they were translated into Latin by another canon of the St.-Dié Cathedral, one Jean Basin de Sandacourt, at the request of Lud.[464]

Vespucci’s last two voyages were made, so his letters assert, in the service of the King of Portugal. The narrative of the first of these—the third of the four voyages—appeared at different times, at several places, and were addressed to more than one person, prior to the publication of the St.-Dié edition of all the letters addressed to René II., the Duke of Lorraine. This fact has added to the confusion and doubt; for each of these copies sent to different persons was a translation, presumably from some common original. One copy of them was addressed to Pietro Soderini, Gonfaloniere of Florence, whom Vespucci claimed as an old friend and school-fellow under the instruction of his uncle, Giorgi Antonio Vespucci; another was sent to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de’ Medici,—Vespucci’s early employer,—both appearing prior to that addressed in the collected edition of St.-Dié addressed to the Duke of Lorraine. Of the earlier editions there was one published, according to Humboldt, in Latin, in 1504, at Augsburg and also at Paris; another in German, in 1505, at Strasburg, and in 1506 at Leipsic; and still another in Italian at Vicenza, in the collection called Paesi novamente, simultaneously with the St.-Dié edition of 1507. These in later years were followed by a number of other editions. While they agree as to general statement, they differ in many particulars, and especially in regard to dates. These, however, are often mere typographical blunders or errors of copyists, not unusual at that era, and always fruitful of controversy. But upon one point, it is to be observed, there is no difference among them; the voyage of 1501—the first from Portugal—is always the third of the four voyages of Vespucci. This disposes, as Humboldt points out, of the charge that Vespucci waited till after the death of Columbus, in 1506, before he ventured to assert publicly that he had made two voyages by order of the King of Spain prior to entering the service of the King of Portugal.

To induce him to leave Spain and come to Portugal, Vespucci says, in the letter addressed to Pietro Soderini, that the King sent to him one Giuliano Bartholomeo del Giocondo, then a resident of Lisbon. Jocundus (the latinized pseudonym of Giocondo) is named as the translator of the Augsburg edition of 1504, addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici. This Jocundus, Humboldt thinks, was Giuliano Giocondo. But Major, in his Henry the Navigator, says that the translation was made, not by Giuliano Giocondo, but by his kinsman Giovanni Giocondo, of Verona. His authority for this statement is apparently Walter Lud’s Speculum. Varnhagen thinks it possible that the work may have been done by one Mathias Ringman,—of whom more presently. Varnhagen says also, in another place, that the translator of the Italian version—published in the Paesi novamente at Vicenza in 1507—unwittingly betrayed that he lied (son mensonge) when he said that he followed a Spanish copy; for while he failed to comprehend the use of the word Jocundus, he showed that it was before him in the Latin copy, as he rendered Jocundus interpres—Jocundus the translator—as el iocondo interprete, the agreeable translator. This is only one example of the confusion in which the subject is involved.

It was due, however, to the Cosmographiæ introductio of St.-Dié, in which the letters appeared as a sort of appendix, that the name of America, from Amerigo, was given to the western hemisphere. But how it happened that the Quatuor navigationes should have been first published in that little town in the Vosges mountains; and what the relation was between Vespucci and René II., the Duke of Lorraine,—are among the perplexing questions in regard to the letters that have been discussed at great length. Major finds in the fact, or assumed fact, that Fra Giovanno Giocondo was the translator of the narrative of the third voyage, the first published, in 1504, an important link in the chain of evidence by which he explains the St.-Dié puzzle. This Giocondo was about that time at Paris as the architect of the bridge of Notre Dame. A young student, Mathias Ringman, from Alsace, was also there at that period; and Major supposes he may have become acquainted with Giocondo, who inspired him with great admiration for Vespucci. It is certain, at any rate, that Ringman, whose literary pseudonym was Philesius Vogesina,—that is, Philesius of the Vosges,—on his return to his native province edited the Strasburg edition (1505) of Giocondo’s translation, appending to it some verses written by himself in praise of Vespucci and his achievements.

In the rare book already referred to, the Speculum of Walter Lud, it is said of this Strasburg edition that “the booksellers carry about a certain epigram of our Philesius in a little book of Vespucci’s translated from Italian into Latin by Giocondo, of Verona, the architect of Venice.” Doubtless Ringman is here spoken of as “our Philesius,” because he had become identified with Lud’s college, where he was the professor of Latin. It seems almost certain, therefore, that the interest at St.-Dié in Vespucci’s voyages was inspired by Ringman, whether his enthusiasm was first aroused by his friendship with Giocondo at Paris, or whether, as Varnhagen supposes, it was the result of a visit or two to Italy. The latter question is not of much moment, except as a speculation; and certainly it is not a straining of probabilities to doubt if Ringman would have taken for his Strasburg edition of 1505 the Giocondo translation, as Lud says he did, if he had himself translated, as Varnhagen supposes, the Augsburg edition of 1504.

Lud also asserts in the Speculum that the French copy of the Quatuor navigationes which was used at St.-Dié came from Portugal. Major supposes that Ringman’s enthusiasm may have led to correspondence with Vespucci, who was in Portugal till 1505, and that he caused his letters to be put into French and sent to Ringman at his request. The narrative of the third voyage in its several editions must have already given some renown to Vespucci. Here were other narratives of other voyages by the same navigator. The clever and enterprising young professors, eager for the dissemination of knowledge, and not unmindful, possibly, of the credit of their college, brought out the letters as a part of the Cosmographiæ introductio by Hylacomylus—Martin Waldzeemüller—the teacher of geography, and the proof-reader to their new press. Their prince, René II., was known as a patron of learning; and it is more likely that they should have prefixed his name to the letters than that Vespucci should have done so. Their zeal undoubtedly was greater than their knowledge; for had they known more of the discoveries of the previous fifteen years they would have hesitated to give to the new continent the name of one who would be thereby raised thenceforth from comparative, though honorable, obscurity to dishonorable distinction. That Vespucci himself, however, was responsible for this there is no positive evidence; and were it not for the difficulty of explaining his constant insistence of the completion of four voyages, it might be possible to find some plausible explanation of the confusion of the St.-Dié book.

In that book are these words: “And the fourth part of the world having been discovered by Americus, it may be called Amerige; that is, the land of Americus or America.”[465] And again: “Now truly, as these regions are more widely explored, and another fourth part is discovered, by Americus Vesputius, as may be learned from the following letters, I see no reason why it should not be justly called Amerigen,—that is, the land of Americus, or America, from Americus, its discoverer, a man of acute intellect; inasmuch as both Europe and Asia have chosen their names from the feminine form.”[466]

It was discovered, less than half a century ago, through the diligent researches of Humboldt, that this professor of geography at St.-Dié, Hylacomylus, was thus the inventor, so to speak, of this word America. That it came at last to be received as the designation of the western continent was due, perhaps, very much to the absence of any suggestion of any other distinctive name that seemed appropriate and was generally acceptable. Rare as the little work, the Cosmographiæ introductio, now is, it was probably well known at the time of the publication of its several editions; as the central position of St.-Dié—between France, Germany, and Italy—gave to the book, as Humboldt thought, a wide circulation, impressing the word America upon the learned world. The name, however, came very slowly into use, appearing only occasionally in some book, till in 1522 it gained a more permanent place on a mappemonde in the Geographia of Ptolemy. From that time it appeared frequently upon other maps, and by the middle of the century became generally recognized outside of Spain, at least, as the established continental name. But the effect of its suggestion was more immediate upon the fame of Vespucci. While the learned understood that the great captain of that time was Christopher Columbus, the name of Amerigo was often united with his as deserving of at least the second place, and sometimes even of the first. The celebrity which Hylacomylus bestowed upon him was accepted for performance by those who were ignorant of the exact truth; and those who knew better did not give themselves the trouble to correct the error.

In each of Vespucci’s voyages he probably held a subordinate position. His place may sometimes have been that of a pilot,[467] or as the commander of a single ship, or attached to the fleet, as Herrera[468] says he was in Ojeda’s expedition (1499), “as merchant, being skilful in cosmography and navigation.” Vespucci himself does not in so many words assert that he was in command of the expeditions upon which he sailed, while he occasionally alludes, though usually in terms of contempt, to those whose authority was above his own. Once he speaks of Columbus, and then almost parenthetically, as the discoverer merely of the Island of Hispaniola; but of other of his achievements, or of those of other eminent navigators, he has nothing to say. In reply to such criticisms of his letters it has been urged on his behalf that they were written for intimate friends, as familiar narratives of personal experiences, and not meant to be, in any broad sense, historical. But the deception was as absolute as if it had been deliberately contrived; and, whether intentional or not, was never by act or word corrected, though Vespucci lived for five years after the appearance of the letters from the St.-Dié press.

But whatever can be or may be said in extenuation of Vespucci, or however strong the reasons for supposing that for whatever was reprehensible in the matter he was innocent and the St.-Dié professors alone responsible, there nevertheless remains the one thing unexplained and inexplicable,—his own repeated assertion that he made four voyages. Humboldt supposes that the narrative of the first, so called, of these four voyages, beginning in May, 1497, was made up of that on which Vespucci certainly sailed with Ojeda, starting in May, 1499. The points of resemblance are so many and so striking as to seem not only conclusive, but to preclude any other theory. If this be true, then it follows that the narrative of the voyage of 1497 was simply a forgery, whosoever was responsible for it; and if a forgery, then Vespucci was not the discoverer of the western continent, and an historical renown was given to his name to which he was not entitled.

The second of the assumed four voyages Humboldt supposes to be the first voyage of Vincente Yañez Pinzon,—hesitating, however, between that and the voyage of Diego de Lepe: the former sailing with four ships in December, 1499, and returning in September, 1500; the latter with two ships, in January, 1500, and returning in June. Vespucci says that he had two ships; that he sailed in May, 1499, and returned in June or September of the next year. It is of the first voyage of 1497 that he says he had four ships. As on that assumed voyage there are many incidents identical with those related of Ojeda’s voyage of 1499, so here there are strong points of resemblance between Vespucci’s supposed second voyage and that of Pinzon. In both cases, however, there are irreconcilable differences, which Humboldt does not attempt to disguise; while at the same time they indicate either dishonesty on the part of Vespucci in his letters, or that those letters were tampered with by others, either ignorantly or with dishonest intent, to which Vespucci afterward tacitly assented.

It would be hypercritical to insist upon a strict adherence to the dates of the several voyages, and then to decide that the voyages were impossible because the dates are irreconcilable. The figures are sometimes obviously mere blunders; as, for example, the assertion in the St.-Dié edition that the second voyage was begun in May, 1489, when it had been already said that the first voyage was made in 1497. But there are statements of facts, nevertheless, which it is necessary to reconcile with dates; and when this is impossible, a doubt of truthfulness is so far justifiable. Thus in the relation of the second voyage Vespucci asserts, or is made to assert, that on the 23d of August, 1499, he saw while at sea a conjunction of Mars and the Moon. That phenomenon did occur at that time, as Humboldt learned from the Ephemeris; and if it was observed by Vespucci at sea, that could not have been upon a voyage with Pinzon, who did not sail till (December, 1499) four months after the conjunction of the planets. But here, moreover, arises another difficulty: Vespucci’s second voyage, in which he observed this conjunction, could not have been made with Ojeda, and must have been made with Pinzon, if on other points the narrative be accepted; for it was upon that voyage that Vespucci says he sailed several degrees south of the equinoctial line to the mouth of the Amazon,—which Pinzon did do, and Ojeda did not. These and other similar discrepancies have led naturally to the suspicion that the incidents of more than one expedition were used, with more or less discrimination, but with little regard to chronology, for the composition of a plausible narrative of two voyages made in the service of Spain. One blunder, detected by Navarrete in this so-called second voyage, it is quite incredible that Vespucci could have committed; for according to the course pursued and the distance sailed, his ships would have been navigated over nearly three hundred leagues of dry land into the interior of the continent. No critical temerity is required to see in such a blunder the carelessness of a copyist or a compositor.

It was of the first voyage from Lisbon—the third of the Quatuor navigationes—that, as has been already said, a narrative was first published in a letter addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici. This was illustrated with diagrams of some of the constellations of the southern hemisphere; and the repute it gave to the writer led the way to his subsequent fame. What Vespucci’s position was in the expedition is not known; but that it was still a subordinate one is evident from his own words, as he speaks of a commander, though only to find fault with him, and without giving his name. The object of the expedition was to discover the western passage to the Spice Islands of the East (Melcha, Melacca, Malaccha, according to the varying texts of different editions of the letter); and though the passage was not found, the voyage was, like Cabot’s, one of the boldest and most important of the age. But it is also, of all Vespucci’s voyages, real or assumed, that which has been most disputed. Navarrete, however, after a careful examination of all the evidence that touches the question, comes to the conclusion that such an expedition, on which Vespucci may have gone in some subordinate position, was really sent out in 1501 by the King of Portugal; and Humboldt concurs in this opinion.

The Terra de Vera Cruz, or Brazil, as it was afterward named, was visited successively for the first time, from January to April, 1500, by Pinzon, De Lepe, De Mendoza, and Cabral. But the expedition to which Vespucci was attached explored the coast from the fifth parallel of southern latitude, three degrees north of Cape St. Augustin,—first discovered and so named by Pinzon,—as far south, perhaps, as about the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude. They had sailed along the coast for about seven hundred leagues; and so beautiful was the country, so luxuriant its vegetation, so salubrious its climate, where men did not die till they were a hundred and fifty years old, that Vespucci was persuaded—as Columbus, only three years before, had said of the region drained by the Orinoco—that the earthly Paradise was not far off. Gold, the natives said, was abundant in the interior; but as the visitors found none, it was determined at last to continue the voyage in another direction, leaving behind them this coast, of what seemed to Vespucci a continent, along which they had sailed from the middle of August to the middle of February. Starting now on the 15th of February from the mainland, they steered southeast, till they reached, on the 3d of April, the fifty-second degree of latitude. They had sailed through stormy seas, driven by violent gales, running away from daylight into nights of fifteen hours in length, and encountering a severity of cold unknown in Southern Europe, and quite beyond their power of endurance. A new land at length was seen; but it only needed a few hours of observation of its dangerous, rocky, and ice-bound coast to satisfy them that it was a barren, uninhabited, and uninhabitable region. This, Varnhagen suggests most reasonably, was the Island of Georgia, rediscovered by Captain Cook nearly three centuries afterward.

The return to Lisbon was in September, 1502. By order of the King, Vespucci sailed again in May, 1503, from Lisbon on a second voyage,—the fourth of his Quatuor navigationes. The object, as before, was to find a western passage to the Moluccas; for it was the trade of India, not new discoveries in the western continent, upon which the mind of the King was bent. There were six ships in this new expedition; and it is generally agreed that as Gonzalo Coelho sailed from Lisbon in May, 1503, by order of Emanuel, in command of six ships, Vespucci probably held a subordinate position in that fleet. He does not name Coelho, but he refers to a superior officer as an obstinate and presumptuous man, who by his bad management wrecked the flagship. Vespucci may have been put in command of two of the ships by the King; with two, at any rate, he became separated, in the course of the voyage, from his commodore, and with them returned to Lisbon in June of the next year. The rest of the fleet Vespucci reported as lost through the pride and folly of the commander; and it was thus, he said, that God punished arrogance. But Vespucci either misunderstood the divine will or misjudged his commander, for the other ships soon after returned in safety.

The southernmost point reached by him on this voyage was the eighteenth degree of southern latitude. At this point, somewhere about Cape Frio, he built a fort, and left in it the crew of one of the two vessels which had been shipwrecked. The precise spot of this settlement is uncertain; but as it was planted by Vespucci, and as it was the first colony of Europeans in that part of the New World, there was an evident and just propriety in bestowing the derivative—America—of his name upon the country, which at first was known as “The Land of the True Cross,” and afterward as “Brazil.” The name of Brazil was retained when the wider application—America—was given to the whole continent.

Soon after his return from this, the last of the Navigationes of which he himself, so far as is known, gave any account, he went back, in 1505, to Spain. It is conjectured that he made other voyages; but whether he did or did not, no absolute evidence has ever been found.[469] We know almost nothing of him up to that time except what is told by himself. When he ceased writing of his own exploits, then also the exploits ceased so far as can be learned from contemporary authors, who hitherto also had been silent about him. In 1508 (March 22) Ferdinand of Spain appointed him pilot-major of the kingdom,[470]—an office of dignity and importance, which probably he retained till he died (Feb. 22, 1512). His fame was largely posthumous; but a hemisphere is his monument. If not among the greatest of the world’s great men, he is among the happiest of those on whom good fortune has bestowed renown.

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During recent years (1892-3) John Fiske, in his Discovery of America, vol. ii., has reinforced the argument of Varnhagen in favor of the disputed (1497) voyage of Vespucius; Henry Harrisse, in his Discovery of North America, rejects his own earlier arguments in its favor; Clements R. Markham, in Christopher Columbus, totally discredits the theory, and Justin Winsor, in his Christopher Columbus, has considered the proposition not proven.

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CRITICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

NOTES ON VESPUCIUS

AND THE

NAMING OF AMERICA.

BY THE EDITOR.

WHILE Vespucius never once clearly affirms that he discovered the main, such an inference may be drawn from what he says. Peter Martyr gives no date at all for the voyage of Pinzon and Solis to the Honduras coast, which was later claimed by Oviedo and Gomara to have preceded that of Columbus to the main. Navarrete has pointed out the varied inconsistencies of the Vespucius narrative,[471] as well as the changes of the dates of the setting out and the return, as given in the various editions.[472] All of them give a period of twenty-nine months for a voyage which Vespucius says only took eighteen,—a difficulty Canovai and others have tried to get over by changing the date of return to 1498; and some such change was necessary to enable Vespucius to be in Spain to start again with Ojeda in May, 1499. Humboldt further instances a great variety of obvious typographical errors in the publications of that day,—as, for instance, where Oviedo says Columbus made his first voyage in 1491.[473] But, as shown in the preceding narrative, an allowance for errors of the press is not sufficient. In regard to the proof of an alibi which Humboldt brought forward from documents said to have been collected by Muñoz from the archives of the Casa de la Contratacion, it is unfortunate that Muñoz himself did not complete that part of his work which was to pertain to Vespucius, and that the documents as he collated them have not been published. In the absence of such textual demonstration, the inference which Humboldt drew from Navarrete’s representations of those documents has been denied by Varnhagen; and H. H. Bancroft in his Central America (i. 99, 102, 106) does not deem the proof complete.[474]

Vespucius’ own story for what he calls his second voyage (1499) is that he sailed from Cadiz shortly after the middle of May, 1499. The subsequent dates of his being on the coast are conflicting; but it would appear that he reached Spain on his return in June or September, 1500. We have, of course, his narrative of this voyage in the collective letter to Soderini;[475] but there is also an independent narrative, published by Bandini (p. 64) in 1745, said to have been written July 18, 1500, and printed from a manuscript preserved in the Riccardiana at Florence.[476] The testimony of Ojeda that Vespucius was his companion in the voyage of 1499-1500 seems to need the qualification that he was with him for a part, and not for the whole, of the voyage; and it has been advanced that Vespucius left Ojeda at Hispaniola, and, returning to Spain, sailed again with Pinzon in December, 1499,—thus attempting to account for the combination of events which seem to connect Vespucius with the voyages of both these navigators.

It is noteworthy that Oviedo, who sought to interpret Peter Martyr as showing that Solis and Pinzon had preceded Columbus to the main, makes no mention of Vespucius. There is no mention of him in what Beneventano furnished to the Ptolemy of 1508. Castanheda does not allude to him, nor does Barreiros in his De Ophira regione (Coimbra, 1560), nor Galvano in his Descobrimientos, nor Pedro Magalhaes de Gandavo in his account of Santa Cruz (1576).[477]

But it was not all forgetfulness as time went on. The currency to his fame which had been given by the De orbe antarctica, by the Paesi novamente, by the Cosmographiæ introductio, as well as by the Mundus novus and the publications which reflected these, was helped on in 1510 by the Roman archæologist Francesco Albertini in his Opusculum de mirabilibus Urbis Romæ, who finds Florence, and not Genoa, to have sent forth the discoverer of the New World.[478]

Two years later (1512) an edition of Pomponius Mela which Cocleus edited, probably at Nuremberg, contained, in a marginal note to a passage on the “Zona incognita,” the following words: “Verus Americus Vesputius iam nostro seculo | novū illū mundū invenissefert Portugalie Castilieq. regū navibus,” etc. Pighius in 1520 had spoken of the magnitude of the region discovered by Vespucius, which had gained it the appellation of a new world.[479] The references in Glareanus, Apian, Phrysius, and Münster show familiarity with his fame by the leading cosmographical writers of the time. Natale Conti, in his Universæ historiæ sui temporis libri XXX (1545-1581), brought him within the range of his memory.[480] In 1590 Myritius, in his Opusculum geographicum, the last dying flicker, as it was, of a belief in the Asian connection of the New World,[481] repeats the oft-told story,—“De Brasilia, terrâ ignis, de meridionali parte Africæ ab Alberico Vesputio inventa.”

In the next century the story is still kept up by the Florentine, Francesco Bocchi, in his Libri duo elogiorum (1607),[482] and by another Florentine, Raffael Gualterotti, in a poem, L’ America (1611),[483]—not to name many others.[484]

But all this fame was not unclouded, and it failed of reflection in some quarters at least. The contemporary Portuguese pilots and cosmographers give no record of Vespucius’ eminence as a nautical geometrician. The Portuguese annalist Damião de Goes makes no mention of him. Neither Peter Martyr nor Benzoni allows him to have preceded Columbus. Sebastian Cabot, as early as 1515, questioned if any faith could be placed in the voyage of 1497 “which Americus says he made.” It is well known that Las Casas more than intimated the chance of his being an impostor; nor do we deduce from the way that his countrymen, Guicciardini[485] and Segni, speak of him, that their faith in the prior claim in his behalf was stable.

An important contestant appeared in Herrera in 1601,[486] who openly charged Vespucius with falsifying his dates and changing the date of 1499 to 1497; Herrera probably followed Las Casas’ manuscripts which he had.[487] The allegation fell in with the prevalent indignation that somebody, rather than a blind fortune, had deprived Columbus of the naming of the New World; and Herrera helped this belief by stating positively that the voyage of Pinzon and Solis, which had been depended upon to antedate Columbus, had taken place as late as 1506.

In the last century Angelo Maria Bandini attempted to stay this tide of reproach in the Vita e lettere di Amerigo Vespucci, gentiluomo fiorentino, which was printed at Florence in 1745.[488] It was too manifestly an unbounded panegyric to enlist the sympathy of scholars. More attention was aroused[489] by an address, with equal adulation, which Stanislao Canovai delivered to the Academy at Cortona in 1788, and which was printed at once as Elogio di Amerigo Vespucci, and various times afterward, with more or less change, till it appeared to revive anew the antagonism of scholars, in 1817.[490] Muñoz had promised to disclose the impostures of Vespucius, but his uncompleted task fell to Santarem, who found a sympathizer in Navarrete; and Santarem’s labored depreciation of Vespucius first appeared in Navarrete’s Coleccion,[491] where Canovai’s arguments are examined at length, with studied refutations of some points hardly worth the labor. This paper was later expanded, as explained in another place.

He claims that one hundred thousand documents in the Royal Archives of Portugal, and the register of maps which belonged to King Emmanuel, make no mention of Vespucius,[492] and that there is no register of the letters-patent which Vespucius claimed to have received. Nor is there any mention in several hundred other contemporary manuscripts preserved in the great library at Paris, and in other collections, which Santarem says he has examined.[493]

An admirer of Vespucius, and the most prominent advocate of a belief in the disputed voyage of 1497, is Francisco Adolpho de Varnhagen, the Baron de Porto Seguro. As early as 1839, in notes to his Diario of Lopez de Souza, he began a long series of publications in order to counteract the depreciation of Vespucius by Ayres de Cazal, Navarrete, and Santarem. In 1854, in his Historia geral do Brazil, he had combated Humboldt’s opinion that it was Pinzon with whom Vespucius had sailed on his second voyage, and had contended for Ojeda. Varnhagen not only accepts the statements of the St.-Dié publications regarding that voyage, but undertakes to track the explorer’s course. In his Amerigo Vespucci, son caractère, etc., he gives a map marking the various voyages of the Florentine.[494] For the voyage of 1497 he makes him strike a little south of west from the Canaries; but leaving his course a blank from the mid-Atlantic, he resumes it at Cape Gracias a Dios on the point of Honduras,[495] and follows it by the coast thence to the Chesapeake, when he passes by Bermuda,[496] and reaches Seville. In this he departs from all previous theories of the landfall, which had placed the contact on the coast of Paria. He takes a view of the Ruysch map[497] of 1508 different from that of any other commentator, in holding the smaller land terminated with a scroll to be not Cuba, but a part of the main westerly, visited by Vespucius in this 1497 voyage; and recently Harrisse, in his Cortereal,[498] argues that the descriptions of Vespucius in this disputed voyage correspond more nearly with the Cantino map[499] than with any other. Harrisse also asks if Waldseemüller did not have such a map as Cantino’s before him; and if the map of Vespucius, which Peter Martyr says Fonseca had, may not have been the same?

Varnhagen, as might be expected in such an advocate, turns every undated incident in Vespucius’ favor if he can. He believes that the white-bearded men who the natives said preceded the Spaniards were Vespucius and his companions. A letter of Vianello, dated Dec. 28, 1506, which Humboldt quotes as mentioning an early voyage in which La Cosa took part, but hesitates to assign to any particular year, Varnhagen eagerly makes applicable to the voyage of 1497.[500] The records of the Casa de la Contratacion which seem to be an impediment to a belief in the voyage, he makes to have reference, not to the ships of Columbus, but to those of Vespucius’ own command. Varnhagen’s efforts to elucidate the career of Vespucius have been eager, if not in all respects conclusive.[501]

We get upon much firmer ground when we come to the consideration of the voyage of 1501,—the first for Portugal, and the third of Vespucius’ so-called four voyages. It seems clear that this voyage was ordered by the Portuguese Government to follow up the chance discovery of the Brazil coast by Cabral in 1500, of which that navigator had sent word back by a messenger vessel. When the new exploring fleet sailed is a matter of uncertainty, for the accounts differ,—the Dutch edition of the account putting it as early as May 1, 1501, while one account places it as late as June 10.[502] When the fleet reached the Cape de Verde Islands, it found there Cabral’s vessels on the return voyage; and what Vespucius here learned from Cabral he embodied in a letter, dated June 4, 1501, which is printed by Baldelli in his Il Milione di Marco Polo, from a manuscript preserved in the Riccardiana Collection.[503] Some time in August—for the exact day is in dispute—he struck the coast of South America, and coursed southward,—returning to Lisbon Sept. 7, 1502.[504]

Vespucius now wrote an account of it, addressed to Lorenzo Piero Francesco de Medici,[505] in which he proposed a designation of the new regions, “novum mundum appellare licet.” Such is the Latin phraseology, for the original Italian text is lost.[506] Within the next two years numerous issues of Giocondo’s Latin text were printed, only two of which are dated,—one at Augsburg in 1504, the other at Strasburg in 1505; and, with a few exceptions, they all, by their published title, gave currency to the designation of Mundus novus.

The earliest of these editions is usually thought to be one Alberic’ vespucci’ laurētio petri francisci de medicis Salutem plurimā dicit, of which a fac-simile of the title is annexed, and which bears the imprint of Jehan Lambert.[507] It is a small plaquette of six leaves; and there are copies in the Lenox and Carter-Brown collections. D’Avezac, and Harrisse, in his later opinion (Additions, p. 19), agree in supposing this the first edition. The dated (1504) Augsburg edition, Mundus novus, is called “extraordinarily rare” by Grenville, who had a copy, now in the British Museum. On the reverse of the fourth and last leaf we read: “Magister Johānes otmar: vindelice impressit Auguste Anno millesimo quingentesimo quarto.” There are copies in the Lenox and Carter-Brown libraries.[508] An edition, Mundus novus, whose four unnumbered leaves, forty lines to the full page, correspond wholly with this last issue, except that for the dated colophon the words Laus Deo are substituted, was put at first by Harrisse[509] at the head of the list, with this title. There is a copy in the Lenox Library, which has another issue, Mundus novus, also in black-letter, forty-two lines to the page;[510] still another, Mundus novus, forty lines to the page;[511] and another, with the words Mundus novus in Roman, of eight leaves, thirty lines to the page.[512] At this point in his enumeration Harrisse placed originally the Jehan Lambert issue (mentioned above), and after it a Mundus novus printed in Paris by Denys Roce, of which only a fragment (five leaves) exists, sold in the Libri sale in London, 1865, and now in the British Museum.[513] Another Paris edition, Mundus novus, printed by Gilles de Gourmont, eight leaves, thirty-one lines to the page, is, according to Harrisse,[514] known only in a copy in the Lenox Library; but D’Avezac refers to a copy in the National Library in Paris.[515]

FIRST PAGE OF MUNDUS NOVUS.

Harrisse, no. 29. Cf. Navarrete, Opúsculos i. 99.

Another Mundus novus is supposed by Harrisse to have been printed somewhere in the lower Rhineland, and to bear the mark of Wm. Vorsterman, of Antwerp, on the last leaf, merely to give it currency in the Netherlands. It has four leaves, and forty-four lines to the full page. There are copies in the Lenox and Harvard College libraries.[516] The Serapeum for January, 1861, describes a Mundus novus as preserved in the Mercantile Library at Hamburg,—a plaquette of four leaves, with forty-five lines to the page,—which seems to differ from all others.[517] Later, in his Additions (1872), Harrisse described other issues of the Novus mundus which do not seem to be identical with those mentioned in his Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima. One of these—Mūdus novus, printed in a very small gothic letter, four leaves—he found in the Biblioteca Cosatenense at Rome.[518] The other has for the leading title, Epistola Albericii: de novo mundo,—a plaquette of four leaves, forty-eight lines to the page, with map and woodcut.[519]

This letter of Vespucius was again issued at Strasburg in 1505, with the title Be [De] ora antarctica, as shown in the annexed fac-simile; and joined with this text, in the little six-leaved tract, was a letter of Philesius to Bruno, and some Latin verses by Philesius; and in this form we have it probably for the last time in that language.[520] This Philesius we shall encounter again later.

It was this Latin rendering by Giocondo, the architect, as Harrisse thinks,[521] upon which the Italian text of the Paesi novamente was founded. Varnhagen in his Amerigo Vespucci, son caractère (p. 13), prints side by side this Italian and the Latin text, marking different readings in the latter. In this same year (1505) the first German edition was issued at Nuremberg, though it is undated: Von der new gefundē Region die wol ein welt genennt mag werden durch den cristenlichen Künig von Portugall wunnderbarlich erfunden.[522] The colophon shows that this German version was made from a copy of the Latin text brought from Paris in May, 1505: Ausz latein ist dist missiue in Teütsch gezogē ausz dem exemplar das von Parisz kam ym maien monet nach Christi geburt, Funfftzenhundert vnnd Fünffjar. Gedruckt yn Nüremburg durch Wolffgang Hueber. The full page of this edition has thirty-seven lines.

TITLE OF THE DRESDEN COPY.

This follows the fac-simile given in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 333, of an edition in the Royal Library at Dresden.

Another edition, issued the same year (1505), shows a slight change in the title, Von der neü gefunden Region so wol ein welt genempt mag werden, durch den Christēlichen künig, von Portigal wunderbarlich erfunden. This is followed by the same cut of the King, and has a similar colophon. Its full page contains thirty-three lines.[523]

Still another edition of the same year and publisher shows thirty-five lines to the page, and above the same cut the title reads: Von der neu gefunden Region die wol ein welt genent mag werden durch den Cristenlichen künig von portigal wunderbarlich erfunden.

FROM THE DRESDEN COPY.

This follows the fac-simile given in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 334, of the reverse of title of a copy preserved in the Royal Library at Dresden.

This is the copy described in the Carter-Brown Catalogue (vol. i. no. 26), and seems to correspond to the copy in the Dresden Library, of which fac-similes of the title and its reverse are given herewith.[524]

Harrisse[525] cites a copy in the British Museum (Grenville), which has thirty-five lines to the page, with the title: Vonderneüw gefunden Region, etc. It is without date and place; but Harrisse sets it under 1505, as he does another issue, Von der Neüwen gefundē Region, of which he found a copy in the Royal Library at Munich,[526] and still another, Von den Nawen Insulen unnd Landen, printed at Leipsic.[527]

In 1506 there were two editions,—one published at Strasburg,[528] Von den Nüwe Insulē und landen (eight leaves); and the other at Leipsic, Von den newen Insulen und Landen (six leaves).[529]

In 1508 there was, according to Brunet,[530] a Strasburg edition, Von den Neüwen Insulen und Landen. There was also a Dutch edition, Van der nieuwer werelt, etc., printed at Antwerp by Jan van Doesborgh, which was first made known by Muller, of Amsterdam, through his Books on America (1872, no. 24). It is a little quarto tract of eight leaves, without date, printed in gothic type, thirty and thirty-one lines to the page, with various woodcuts. It came from an “insignificant library,”—that of the architect Bosschaert,[531]—sold in 1871 in Antwerp, and was bound up with three other tracts of the first ten years of the sixteenth century. It cost Muller 830 florins, and subsequently passed into the Carter-Brown Library, and still remains unique. Muller had placed it between 1506 and 1509; but Mr. Bartlett, in the Carter-Brown Catalogue (vol. i. no. 38), assigns it to 1508. Muller had also given a fac-simile of the first page; but only the cut on that page is reproduced in the Carter-Brown Catalogue (i. 46), as well as a cut showing a group of four Indians, which is on the reverse of the last leaf. Mr. Carter-Brown printed a fac-simile edition (twenty-five copies) in 1874 for private distribution.[532]

That portion of the Latin letter which Vespucius addressed to Soderini on his four voyages differs from the text connected with Giocondo’s name, and will be found in the various versions of the Paesi novamente and in Grynæus, as well as in Ramusio (i. 128), Bandini (p. 100), and Canovai in Italian, and in English in Kerr’s Voyages (vol. iii., 1812, p. 342) and in Lester (p. 223). There are also German versions in Voss, Allerälteste Nachricht von den neuen Welt (Berlin, 1722), and in Spanish in Navarrete’s Coleccion (iii. 190).

There is another text, the “Relazione,” published by Francesco Bartolozzi in 1789,[533] after it had long remained in manuscript; it also is addressed to the same Lorenzo.[534] If the original account as written by Vespucius himself was in Portuguese and addressed to King Manoel, it is lost.[535]

Of the Vespucius-Coelho voyage we have only the account which is given in connection with the other three, in which Vespucius gives May 10 as the date of sailing; but Coelho is known to have started June 10, with six ships. Varnhagen has identified the harbor, where he left the shipwrecked crew, with Port Frio.[536] Returning, they reached Lisbon June 18 (or 28), and on the 4th of the following September Vespucius dated his account.[537]

If we draw a line from Nancy to Strasburg as the longer side of a triangle, its apex to the south will fall among the Vosges, where in a secluded valley lies the town of St.-Dié. What we see there to-day of man’s work is scarcely a century and a half old; for the place was burned in 1756, and shortly after rebuilt. In the early part of the sixteenth century St.-Dié was in the dominion of Duke René of Lorraine. It had its cathedral and a seminary of learning (under the patronage of the Duke), and a printing-press had been set up there. The reigning prince, as an enlightened friend of erudition, had drawn to his college a number of learned men; and Pico de Mirandola, in addressing a letter to the editor of the Ptolemy of 1513, expressed surprise that so scholarly a body of men existed in so obscure a place. Who were these scholars?

The chief agent of the Duke in the matter seems to have been his secretary, Walter Lud or Ludd, or Gualterus Ludovicus, as his name was latinized. The preceding narrative has indicated his position in this learned community,[538] and has cited the little tractate of four leaves by him, the importance of which was first discovered, about twenty years ago, by Henry Stevens,[539] and of which the only copies at present known are in the British Museum and the Imperial Library at Vienna.[540] From this tiny Speculum, as we shall see, we learn some important particulars. Just over the line of Lorraine, and within the limits of Alsace, there was born and had lived a certain Mathias Ringmann or Ringman. In these early years of the century (1504) he was a student in Paris among the pupils of a certain Dr. John Faber,—to be in other ways, as we shall see, connected with the development of the little story now in progress. In Paris at the same time, and engaged in building the Notre Dame bridge, was the Veronese architect Fra Giovanni Giocondo. Major thinks there is great reason for believing that the young Alsatian student formed the acquaintance of the Italian architect, and was thus brought to entertain that enthusiasm for Vespucius which Giocondo, as a countryman of the navigator, seems to have imparted to his young friend. At least the little that is known positively seems to indicate this transmission of admiration.

We must next revert to what Vespucius himself was doing to afford material for this increase of his fame. On his return from his last voyage he had prepared an account at full length of his experiences in the New World, “that coming generations might remember him.” No such ample document, however, is now known. There was at this time (1504) living in Florence a man of fifty-four, Piero Soderini, who two years before, had been made perpetual Gonfaloniere of the city. He had been a schoolmate of Vespucius; and to him, dating from Lisbon, Sept. 4, 1504, the navigator addressed an account of what he called his four voyages, abstracted as is supposed from the larger narrative. The original text of this abstract is also missing, unless we believe, with Varnhagen, that the text which he gives in his Amerigo Vespucci, son caractère, etc. (p. 34), printed at Lima in 1865, is such, which he supposes to have been published at Florence in 1505-1506, since a printed copy of an Italian text, undated, had been bought by him in Havana (1863) in the same covers with another tract of 1506.[541] Other commentators have not placed this Italian tract so early. It has not usually been placed before 1510.[542] Dr. Court put it before 1512. Harrisse gave it the date of 1516 because he had found it bound with another tract of that date; but in his Additions, p. xxv, he acknowledges the reasons inconclusive. Major contends that there is no reason to believe that any known Italian text antedates the Latin, yet to be mentioned. This Italian text is called Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi ... Data in Lisbona a di 4 di Septembre, 1504. It is a small quarto of sixteen leaves.[543]

Varnhagen does not question that the early Italian print is the better text, differing as it does from Bassin’s Latin; and he follows it by preference in all his arguments. He complains that Bandini and Canovai reprinted it with many errors.

Ramusio in his first volume had reprinted that part of it which covers the third and fourth voyage; and it had also been given in French in the collection of Jean Temporal at Lyons in 1556, known otherwise as Jean Leon’s (Leo Africanus) Historiale description de l’Afrique, with a preface by Ramusio.[544]

It is Major’s belief that the original text of the abstract intended for Soderini was written in a sort of composite Spanish-Italian dialect, such as an Italian long in the service of the Iberian nations might acquire,[545] and that a copy of it coming into the possession of Vespucius’ countryman, Giocondo, in Paris, it was by that architect translated into French, and at Ringmann’s suggestion addressed to René and intrusted to Ringmann to convey to the Duke, of whom the Alsatian felt proud, as an enlightened sovereign whose dominions were within easy reach of his own home. Major also suggests that the preliminary parts of the narrative, referring to the school-day acquaintance of Vespucius with the person whom he addressed, while it was true of Soderini,[546] was not so of René; but, being retained, has given rise to confusion.[547] Lud tells us only that the letters were sent from Portugal to René in French, and Waldseemüller says that they were translated from the Italian to the French, but without telling us whence they came.

We know, at all events, that Ringmann returned to the Vosges country, and was invited to become professor of Latin in the new college, where he taught thereafter, and that he had become known, as was the fashion, under the Latin name of Philesius, whose verses have already been referred to. The narrative of Vespucius, whether Ringmann brought it from Paris, or however it came, was not turned from the French into Latin by him,[548] but, as Lud informs us, by another canon of the Cathedral, Jean Bassin de Sandacourt, or Johannes Basinus Sandacurius, as he appears in Lud’s Latin.

Just before this, in 1504, there had joined the college, as teacher of geography, another young man who had classicized his name, and was known as Hylacomylus. It was left, as has been mentioned, for Humboldt (Examen critique, iv. 99) to identify him as Martin Waltzemüller,—who however preferred to write it Waldseemüller.

It was a project among this St.-Dié coterie to edit Ptolemy,[549] and illustrate his cosmographical views, just as another coterie at Vienna were engaged then and later in studying the complemental theories of Pomponius Mela. Waldseemüller, as the teacher of geography, naturally assumed control of this undertaking; and the Duke himself so far encouraged the scheme as to order the engraving of a map to accompany the exposition of the new discoveries,—the same which is now known as the Admiral’s map.[550]

In pursuance of these studies Waldseemüller had prepared a little cosmographical treatise, and this it was now determined to print at the College Press at St.-Dié. Nothing could better accompany it than the Latin translation of the Four Voyages of Vespucius and some verses by Philesius; for Ringmann, as we have seen, was a verse-maker, and had a local fame as a Latin poet. Accordingly, unless Varnhagen’s theory is true, which most critics are not inclined to accept, these letters of Vespucius first got into print, not in their original Italian, but in a little Latin quarto of Waldseemüller, printed in this obscure nook of the Vosges. Under the title of Cosmographiæ introductio, this appeared twice, if not oftener, in 1507.[551]

To establish the sequence of the editions of the Cosmographiæ introductio in 1507[552] is a bibliographical task of some difficulty, and experts are at variance. D’Avezac (Waltzemüller, p. 112) makes four editions in 1507, and establishes a test for distinguishing them by taking the first line of the title, together with the date of the colophon; those of May corresponding to the 25th of April, and those of September to the 29th of August:—

1. Cosmographiæ introdu—vij kl’ Maij.
2. Cosmographiæ introductio—vij kl’ Maij.
3. Cosmographiæ—iiij kl’ Septembris.
4. Cosmographiæ introdu—iiij kl’ Septembris.

PTOLEMY’S WORLD.
(Reduced after map in Bunbury’s Ancient Geography, London, 1879, vol. ii.)

The late Henry C. Murphy[553] maintained that nos. 1 and 4 in this enumeration are simply made up from nos. 2 and 3 (the original May and September editions), to which a new title,—the same in each case,—with the substitution of other leaves for the originals of leaves 1, 2, 5, and 6,—also the same in each case,—was given. Harrisse, however, dissents, and thinks D’Avezac’s no. 1 a genuine first edition. The only copy of it known[554] was picked up on a Paris quay for a franc by the geographer Eyriès, which was sold at his death, in 1846, for 160 francs, and again at the Nicholas Yéméniz sale (Lyons, no. 2,676), in 1867, for 2,000 francs. It is now in the Lenox Library.[555]

Of the second of D’Avezac’s types there are several copies known. Harrisse[556] names the copies in the Lenox, Murphy,[557] and Carter-Brown[558] collections. There is a record of other copies in the National Library at Rio Janeiro,[559] in the Royal Library at Berlin,[560] in the Huth Collection[561] in London, and in the Mazarine Library in Paris,—a copy which D’Avezac[562] calls “irréprochable.” Tross held a copy in 1872 for 1,500 francs. Waldseemüller’s name does not appear in these early May issues, which are little quartos of fifty-two leaves, twenty-seven lines to the full page, with an inscription of twelve lines, in Roman type, on the back of the folding sheet of a skeleton globe.[563]

On the 29th of August (iiij kl’ Septembris) it was reissued, still without Waldseemüller’s name, of the same size, and fifty-two leaves; but the folding sheet bears on the reverse an inscription in fifteen lines. The ordinary title is D’Avezac’s no. 3. Harrisse[564] mentions the Lenox and Carter-Brown[565] copies; but there are others in Harvard College Library (formerly the Cooke copy, no. 625, besides an imperfect copy which belonged to Charles Sumner), in Charles Deane’s Collection, and in the Barlow Library. The Murphy Library had a copy (no. 680) in its catalogue, and the house of John Wiley’s Sons advertised a copy in New York in 1883 for $350.

There are records of copies in Europe,—in the Imperial Library at Vienna, in the National Library at Paris, and in the Huth Collection (Catalogue, i. 356) in London. D’Avezac (Waltzemüller, pp. 54, 55) describes a copy which belonged to Yéméniz, of Lyons. Brockhaus advertised one in 1861 (Trömel, no. 1). Another was sold in Paris for 2,000 francs in 1867. There was another in the Sobolewski sale (no. 3,769), and one in the Court Catalogue (no. 92). Leclerc, 1878 (no. 599), has advertised one for 500 francs, Harrassowitz, 1881, (no. 309) one for 1,000 marks, and Rosenthal, of Munich, in 1884 (no. 30) held one at 3,000 marks. One is also shown in the Catalogue of the Reserved and Most Valuable Portion of the Libri Collection (no. 15).

The latter portion of the book, embracing the Quattuor Americi Vesputii navigationes, seems to have been issued also separately, and is still occasionally found.[566]

What seems to have been a composite edition, corresponding to D’Avezac’s fourth, made up, as Harrisse thinks (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 47), of the introductory part of D’Avezac’s first and the voyages of his third edition, is also found, though very rarely. There is a copy in the Lenox Library of this description, and another, described by Harrisse, in the Mazarine Library in Paris.[567]

It was in this precious little quarto of 1507, whose complicated issues we have endeavored to trace, that, in the introductory portion, Waldseemüller, anonymously to the world, but doubtless with the privity of his fellow-collegians, proposed in two passages, already quoted, but here presented in fac-simile, to stand sponsor for the new-named western world; and with what result we shall see.

TITLE OF THE SEPTEMBER EDITION, 1507.

This is the third edition of D’Avezac’s enumeration.

It was a strange sensation to name a new continent, or even a hitherto unknown part of an old one. There was again the same uncertainty of continental lines as when Europe had been named[568] by the ancients, for there was now only the vaguest notion of what there was to be named. Columbus had already died in the belief that he had only touched the eastern limits of Asia. There is no good reason to believe that Vespucius himself was of a different mind.[569] So insignificant a gain to Europe had men come to believe these new islands, compared with the regions of wealth and spices with which Vasco da Gama and Cabral had opened trade by the African route, that the advocate and deluded finder of the western route had died obscurely, with scarcely a record being made of his departure. A few islands and their savage inhabitants had scarcely answered the expectation of those who had pictured from Marco Polo the golden glories of Cathay.

FROM THE COSMOGRAPHIÆ INTRODUCTIO.

That part of the page (sig. C) of the September edition (1507) which has the reference to America and Vespucius.

FROM THE COSMOGRAPHIÆ INTRODUCTIO.

That part of the page of the 1507 (September) edition in which the name of America is proposed for the New World.

To Columbus himself the new-found regions were only “insulæ Indiæ super Gangem,”—India east of the Ganges; and the “Indies” which he supposed he had found, and for whose native races the Asiatic name was borrowed and continues to abide, remained the Spanish designation of their possessions therein, though distinguished in time by the expletive West Indies.[570] It never occurred to the discoverers themselves to give a new name to regions which they sometimes designated generically as Mundus Novus or Alter Orbis; but it is doubtful as Humboldt says, if they intended by such designation any further description than that the parts discovered were newly found, just as Strabo, Mela, Cadamosto and others had used similar designations.[571] It was at a much later day, and when the continental character of the New World was long established, that some Spaniard suggested Colonia, or Columbiana; and another, anxious to commemorate the sovereigns of Castile and Leon, futilely coined the cumbrous designation of Fer-Isabelica.[572] When Columbus and others had followed a long stretch of the northern coast of South America without finding a break, and when the volume of water pouring through the mouths of the Orinoco betokened to his mind a vast interior, it began to be suspected that the main coast of Asia had been found; and the designation of Tierra firme was naturally attached to the whole region, of which Paria and the Pearl coast were distinguishable parts. This designation of Firm Land was gradually localized as explorations extended, and covered what later was known as Castilla del Oro; and began to comprehend in the time of Purchas,[573] for instance, all that extent of coast from Paria to Costa Rica.[574]

When Cabral in 1500 sighted the shores of Brazil, he gave the name of Terra Sanctæ Crucis to the new-found region,—the land of the Holy Cross; and this name continued for some time to mark as much as was then known of what we now call South America, and we find it in such early delineations as the Lenox globe and the map of Sylvanus in 1511.[575] It will be remembered that in 1502, after what is called his third voyage, Vespucius had simply named the same region Mundus Novus.

Thus in 1507 there was no general concurrence in the designations which had been bestowed on these new islands and coasts; and the only unbroken line which had then been discovered was that stretching from Honduras well down the eastern coast of South America, if Vespucius’ statement of having gone to the thirty-second degree of southern latitude was to be believed. After the exploration of this coast,—thanks to the skill of Vespucius in sounding his own exploits and giving them an attractive setting out,[576] aided, probably, by that fortuitous dispensation of fortune which sometimes awards fame where it is hardly deserved,—it had come to pass that the name of Vespucius had, in common report, become better associated than that of Columbus with the magnitude of the new discoveries. It was not so strange then as it appears now that the Florentine, rather than the Genoese, was selected for such continental commemoration. All this happened to some degree irrespective of the question of priority in touching Tierra Firme, as turning upon the truth or falsity of the date 1497 assigned to the first of the voyages of Vespucius.

The proposing of a name was easy; the acceptance of it was not so certain. The little tract had appeared without any responsible voucher. The press-mark of St.-Dié was not a powerful stamp. The community was obscure, and it had been invested with what influence it possessed by the association of Duke René with it.

This did not last long. The Duke died in 1508, and his death put a stop to the projected edition of Ptolemy and broke up the little press; so that next year (1509), when Waldseemüller planned a new edition of the Cosmographiæ introductio, it was necessary to commit it to Grüninger in Strasburg to print. In this edition Waldseemüller first signed his own name to the preface. Copies of this issue are somewhat less rare than those of 1507. It is a little tract of thirty-two leaves, some copies having fourteen, others fifteen, lines on the back of the folding sheet.[577] The Lenox Library has examples of each.

THE LENOX GLOBE.

A section of the drawing given by Dr. De Costa in his monograph on the globe, showing the American parts reduced to a plane projection, and presenting the name of Terra Sanctæ Crucis. There is another sketch on p. 123.

There are other copies in the Carter-Brown (Catalogue, vol. i. no. 40), Barlow, and Harvard College libraries. Another is in the Force Collection, Library of Congress, and one was sold in the Murphy sale (no. 681). The copy which belonged to Ferdinand Columbus is still preserved in Seville; but its annotations do not signify that the statements in it respecting Vespucius’ discoveries attracted his attention.[578] It was this edition which Navarrete used when he made a Spanish version for his Coleccion (iii. 183) D’Avezac used a copy in the Mazarine Library; and other copies are noted in the Huth (i. 356) and Sunderland (Catalogue, vol. v. no. 12,920) collections. The account of the voyages in this edition was also printed separately in German as Diss buchlin saget wie die zwē ... herrē, etc.[579]

While the Strasburg press was emitting this 1509 edition it was also printing the sheets of another little tract, the anonymous Globus mundi,[580] of which a fac-simile of the title is annexed, in which it will be perceived the bit of the New World shown is called “Newe welt,” and not America, though “America lately discovered” is the designation given in the text. The credit of the discovery is given unreservedly to Vespucius, and Columbus is not mentioned.[581]

The breaking up of the press was a serious blow to the little community at St.-Dié. Ringmann, in the full faith of completing the edition of Ptolemy which they had in view, had brought from Italy a Greek manuscript of the old geographer; but the poet was soon to follow his patron, for, having retired to Schlestadt, his native town, he died there in 1511 at the early age of twenty-nine. The Ptolemy project, however, did not fail. Its production was transferred to Strasburg; and there, in 1513, it appeared, including the series of maps associated ever since with the name of Hylacomylus, and showing evidences in the text of the use which had been made of Ringmann’s Greek manuscript.

TITLE OF THE 1509 (STRASBURG) EDITION.

We look to this book in vain for any attempt to follow up the conferring of the name of Vespucius on the New World. The two maps which it contains, showing the recent discoveries, are given in fac-simile on pages 111 and 112. In one the large region which stands for South America has no designation; in the other there is supposed to be some relation to Columbus’ own map, while it bears a legend which gives to Columbus unequivocally the credit of the discovery of the New World. It has been contended of late that the earliest cartographical application of the name is on two globes preserved in the collection of the Freiherr von Hauslab, in Vienna, one of which (printed) Varnhagen in his paper on Apianus and Schöner puts under 1509, and the other (manuscript) under 1513. Weiser in his Magalhâes-Strasse (p. 27) doubts these dates.[582] The application of the new name, America, we also find not far from this time, say between 1512 and 1515, in a manuscript mappemonde (see p. 125) which Major, when he described it in the Archæologia (xl. p. 1), unhesitatingly ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci, thinking that he could trace certain relations between Da Vinci and Vespucius. This map bears distinctly the name America on the South American continent. Its connection with Da Vinci is now denied.

TITLE OF THE 1509 (STRASBURG) EDITION.

Not far from the same time a certain undated edition of the Cosmographiæ introductio appeared at Lyons, though no place is given. Of this edition there are two copies in the British Museum, and others in the Lenox and Barlow collections; but they all lack a map,[583] which is found in a copy first brought to public attention by the bookseller Tross, of Paris, in 1881,[584] and which is now owned by Mr. C. H. Kalbfleisch, of New York. Its date is uncertain. Harrisse (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 63) placed it first in 1510, but later (Cabots, p. 182) he dated it about 1514, as Tross had already done. D’Avezac (Waltzemüller, p. 123) thinks it could not have been earlier than 1517.[585]

The chief interest of this map to us is the fact that it bears the words “America noviter reperta” on what stands for South America; and there is fair ground for supposing that it antedates all other printed maps yet known which bear this name.

At not far from the same time, fixed in this instance certainly in 1515, we find America on the earliest known globe of Schöner.[586] Probably printed to accompany this globe, is a rare little tract, issued the same year (1515) at Nuremberg, under the title of Luculentissima quædā terræ totius descriptio. In this Schöner speaks of a “fourth part of the globe, named after its discoverer, Americus Vespucius, a man of sagacious mind, who found it in 1497,” adopting the controverted date.[587]

Meanwhile the fame of Vespucius was prospering with the Vienna coterie. One of them, Georg Tanstetter, sometimes called Collimitius, was editing the De natura locorum librum of Albertus Magnus; and apparently after the book was printed he made with type a marginal note, to cite the profession of Vespucius that he had reached to fifty degrees south, as showing that there was habitable land so far towards the Southern Pole.[588]

Joachim Watt, or Vadianus, as he was called in his editorial Latin, had in 1515 adopted the new name of America, and repeated it in 1518, when he reproduced his letter in his edition of Pomponius Mela, as explained on another page.[589] Apian had been employed to make the mappemonde for it, which was to show the new discoveries. The map seems not to have been finished in time; but when it appeared, two years later (1520), in the new edition of Solinus, by Camers, though it bore the name of America on the southern main, it still preserved the legend in connection therewith which awarded the discovery to Columbus.[590] Watt now quarrelled with Camers, for they had worked jointly, and their two books are usually found in one cover, with Apian’s map between them. Returning to St. Gall, Vadianus practised there as a physician, and reissued his Mela at Basle in 1522, dedicating it to that Dr. Faber who had been the teacher of Ringmann in Paris eighteen years before.[591]

In 1522 Lorenz Friess, or Laurentius Phrysius, another of Duke René’s coterie, a correspondent of Vespucius, published a new edition of Ptolemy at the Grüninger press in Strasburg, in which the fame of Columbus and Vespucius is kept up in the usual equalizing way. The preface, by Thomas Ancuparius, sounds the praises of the Florentine, ascribing to him the discovery “of what we to-day call America;” the Admiral’s map, Tabula Terre Nove,[592] which Waldseemüller had published in the 1513 edition, is once more reproduced, with other of the maps of that edition, re-engraved on a reduced scale. The usual legend, crediting the discovery to Columbus, is shown in a section of the map, which is given in another place.[593] Phrysius acknowledges that the maps are essentially Waldseemüller’s, though they have some changes and additions; but he adds a new mappemonde of his own, putting the name America on the great southern main,—the first time of its appearing in any map of the Ptolemy series. A fac-simile is annexed.

There is thus far absolutely no proof that any one disputed the essential facts of the discovery by Columbus of the outlying islands of Asia, as the belief went, or denied him the credit of giving a new world to the crowns of Aragon and Castile, whether that were Asia or not. The maps which have come down to us, so far as they record anything, invariably give Columbus the credit. The detractors and panegyrists of Vespucius have asserted in turn that he was privy to the doings at St.-Dié and Strasburg, and that he was not; but proof is lacking for either proposition. No one can dispute, however, that he was dead before his name was applied to the new discoveries on any published map.

If indeed the date of 1497, as given by the St.-Dié publication, was correct, there might have been ground for adjudging his explorations of the mainland to have antedated those of Columbus; but the conclusion is irresistible that either the Spanish authorities did not know that such a claim had been made, or they deemed the date an error of the press; since to rely upon the claim would have helped them in their conflict with the heirs of Columbus, which began the year following the publication of that claim, or in 1508 and continued to vex all concerned till 1527; and during all that time Vespucius, as has been mentioned, is not named in the records of the proceedings. It is equally hard to believe that Ferdinand Columbus would have passed by a claim derogating from the fame of his father, if it had come to him as a positive assertion. That he knew of the St.-Dié tract we have direct evidence in his possession of a copy of it. That it did not trouble him we know also with as much confidence as negative testimony can impart; for we have no knowledge of his noticing it, but instead the positive assertion of a contemporary that he did not notice it.

The claim for Vespucius, however, was soon to be set up. In 1527 Las Casas began, if we may believe Quintana, the writing of his Historia.[594] It is not easy, however, to fix precisely the year when he tells us that the belief had become current of Vespucius being really the first to set his foot on the main. “Amerigo,” he tells us further,[595] “is said to have placed the name of America on maps,[596] thus sinfully failing toward the Admiral. If he purposely gave currency to this belief in his first setting foot on the main, it was a great wickedness; and if it was not done intentionally, it looks like it.” Las Casas still makes allowances, and fails of positive accusation, when again he speaks of “the injustice of Amerigo, or the injustice perhaps those who printed the Quattuor navigationes appear to have committed toward the Admiral;” and once more when he says that “foreign writers call the country America: it ought to be called Columba.” But he grows more positive as he goes on, when he wonders how Ferdinand Columbus, who had, as he says, Vespucius’ account, could have found nothing in it of deceit and injustice to object to.

Who were these “foreign writers?” Stobnicza, of Cracow, in the Introductio in Claudii Ptholomei cosmographiā, which he published in 1512, said: “Et ne soli Ptolomeo laborassem, curavi etiam notas facere quasdam partes terre ipsi ptolomeo alijsque vetustioribus ignotas que Amerii vespucij aliorumque lustratione ad nostram noticiam puenere.” Upon the reverse of folio v., in the chapter “De meridianis,” occurs: “Similiter in occasu ultra africam & europam magna pars terre quam ab Americo eius reptore Americam vocant vulgo autem novus mundus dicitur.” Upon the reverse of folio vii. in the chapter “De partibus terre” is this: “Non solū aūt pdicte tres ptes nunc sunt lacius lustrate, verum & alia quata pars ab Americo vesputio sagacis ingenii viro inventa est, quam ab ipso Americo eius inventore Ameriḡem si a americi terram sive americā appellari volunt cuius latitudo est sub tota torrida zona,” etc. These expressions were repeated in the second edition in 1519.

LAURENTIUS FRISIUS, IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1522 (westerly part.)

Apian in 1524 had accepted the name in his Cosmographicus liber, as he had in an uncertain way, in 1522, in two editions, one printed at Ratisbon, the other without place, of the tract, Declaratio et usus typi cosmographici, illustrative of his map.[597]

Glareanus in 1529 spoke of the land to the west “quam Americam vocant,” though he couples the names of Columbus and Vespucius in speaking of its discovery. Apian and Gemma Phrysius in their Cosmographia of the same year recognize the new name;[598] and Phrysius again in his De principiis astronomiæ, first published at Antwerp in 1530, gave a chapter (no. xxx.) to “America,” and repeated it in later editions.[599] Münster in the Novus orbis of 1532 finds that the extended coast of South America “takes the name of America from Americus, who discovered it.”[600] We find the name again in the Epitome trium terræ partium of Vadianus, published at Tiguri in 1534,[601] and in Honter’s Rudimentorum cosmographiæ libri, published at Basle in the same year. When the Spanish sea-manual, Medina’s Arte de navegar, was published in Italian at Venice in 1544, it had a chart with America on it; and the De sphæra of Cornelius Valerius (Antwerp, 1561) says this fourth part of the world took its name from Americus.

Thus it was manifest that popular belief, outside of Spain, at least,[602] was, as Las Casas affirms, working at last into false channels. Of course the time would come when Vespucius, wrongfully or rightfully, would be charged with promoting this belief. He was already dead, and could not repel the insinuation. In 1533 this charge came for the first time in print, so far as we now know, and from one who had taken his part in spreading the error. It has already been mentioned how Schöner, in his globe of 1515, and in the little book which explained that globe, had accepted the name from the coterie of the Vosges. He still used the name in 1520 in another globe.[603] Now in 1533, in his Opusculum geographicum ex diversorum libris ac cartis summa cura & diligentia collectum, accomodatum ad recenter elaboratum ab eodem globum decriptionis terrenæ. Ioachimi Camerarii. Ex urbe Norica, ... Anno XXXIII,[604] he unreservedly charged Vespucius with fixing his own name upon that region of India Superior which he believed to be an island.[605]

In 1535, in a new edition of Ptolemy, Servetus repeated the map of the New World from the editions of 1522 and 1525 which helped to give further currency to the name of America; but he checks his readers in his text by saying that those are misled who call the continent America, since Vespucius never touched it till long after Columbus had.[606] This cautious statement did not save Servetus from the disdainful comment of Gomara (1551), who accuses that editor of Ptolemy of attempting to blacken the name of the Florentine.

It was but an easy process for a euphonious name, once accepted for a large part of the new discoveries, gradually to be extended until it covered them all. The discovery of the South Sea by Balboa in 1513 rendered it certain that there was a country of unmistakably continental extent lying south of the field of Columbus’ observations, which, though it might prove to be connected with Asia by the Isthmus of Panama, was still worthy of an independent designation.[607] We have seen how the Land of the Holy Cross, Paria, and all other names gave way in recognition of the one man who had best satisfied Europe that this region had a continental extent. If it be admitted even that Vespucius was in any way privy to the bestowal of his name upon it, there was at first no purpose to enlarge the application of such name beyond this well-recognized coast.

MERCATOR, 1541.

This is the configuration of Mercator’s gores (for a globe) reduced to Mercator’s subsequently-devised projection.

That the name went beyond that coast came of one of those shaping tendencies which are without control. “It was,” as Humboldt says,[608] “accident, and not fraud and dissensions, which deprived the continent of America of the name of Columbus.” It was in 1541, and by Mercator in his printed gores for a globe, that in a cartographical record we first find the name America extended to cover the entire continent; for he places the letters AME at Baccalaos, and completed the name with RICA at the La Plata.[609] Thus the injustice was made perpetual; and there seems no greater instance of the instability of truth in the world’s history. Such monstrous perversion could but incite an indignation which needed a victim,—and it found him in Vespucius. The intimation of Schöner was magnified in time by everybody, and the unfortunate date of 1497, as well as the altogether doubtful aspect of his Quattuor navigationes, helped on the accusation. Vespucius stood in every cyclopædia and history as the personification of baseness and arrogance;[610] and his treacherous return for the kindness which Columbus did him in February, 1505, when he gave him a letter of recommendation to his son Diego,[611] at a time when the Florentine stood in need of such assistance, was often made to point a moral. The most emphatic of these accusers, working up his case with every subsidiary help, has been the Viscount Santarem. He will not admit the possibility of Vespucius’ ignorance of the movement at St.-Dié. “We are led to the conclusion,” he says, in summing up, “that the name given to the new continent after the death of Columbus was the result of a preconceived plan against his memory, either designedly and with malice aforethought, or by the secret influence of an extensive patronage of foreign merchants residing at Seville and elsewhere, dependent on Vespucius as naval contractor.”[612]

It was not till Humboldt approached the subject in the fourth and fifth volumes of his Examen critique de l’histoire et de la géographie du nouveau monde that the great injustice to Vespucius on account of the greater injustice to Columbus began to be apparent. No one but Santarem, since Humboldt’s time, has attempted to rehabilitate the old arguments. Those who are cautious had said before that he might pardonably have given his name to the long coast-line which he had tracked, but that he was not responsible for its ultimate expansion.[613] But Humboldt’s opinion at once prevailed, and he reviewed and confirmed them in his Cosmos.[614] Humboldt’s views are convincingly and elaborately enforced; but the busy reader may like to know they are well epitomized by Wiesener in a paper, “Améric Vespuce et Christophe Colomb: la véritable origine du nom d’Amérique,” which was published in the Revue des questions historiques (1866), i. 225-252, and translated into English in the Catholic World (1867), v. 611.

The best English authority on this question is Mr. R. H. Major, who has examined it with both thoroughness and condensation of statement in his paper on the Da Vinci map in the Archæologia, vol. xl., in his Prince Henry the Navigator (pp. 367-380),[615] and in his Discoveries of Prince Henry, chap. xiv. Harrisse in his Bibl. Amer. Vet., pp. 65, 94, enumerates the contestants on the question; and Varnhagen, who is never unjust to Columbus, traces in a summary way the progress in the acceptance of the name of America in his Nouvelles recherches sur les derniers voyages du navigateur Florentin. In German, Oscar Peschel in his Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen (book ii. chap. 13) has examined the matter with a scholar’s instincts. The subject was followed by M. Schoetter in a paper read at the Congrès des Américanistes at Luxemburg in 1877; but it is not apparent from the abstract of the paper in the Proceedings of that session (p. 357) that any new light was thrown upon the matter.

Professor Jules Marcou would drive the subject beyond the bounds of any personal associations by establishing the origin of the name in the native designation (Americ, Amerrique, Amerique) of a range of mountains in Central America;[616] and Mr. T. H. Lambert, in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (no. 1 of 1883), asks us to find the origin in the name given by the Peruvians to their country,—neither of which theories has received or is likely to receive any considerable acceptance.[617]

APIANUS (from Reusner’s Icones, 1590, p. 175).

---

[THE BIBLIOGRAPHY]

OF

POMPONIUS MELA, SOLINUS, VADIANUS, AND APIANUS.

BY THE EDITOR.

POMPONIUS MELA’S WORLD.

Reduced after map in Bunbury’s Ancient Geography (London, 1879), ii. 368.

OF Pomponius Mela we know little beyond the fact that he was born in Spain, not far from Gibraltar, and that he wrote, as seems probable, his popular geographical treatise in the year 43 A.D.[618] The editio princeps of this treatise was printed in 1471 at Milan, it is supposed, by Antonius Zarotus, under the title Cosmographia. It was a small quarto of fifty-nine leaves. Two copies have been sold lately. The Sunderland copy (no. 10,117) brought £11 5s., and has since been held by Quaritch at £15 15s. Another copy was no. 897 in part iii. of the Beckford Catalogue. In 1478 there was an edition, De situ orbis, at Venice (Sunderland, no. 10,118); and in 1482 another edition, Cosmographia geographica, was also published at Venice (Leclerc, no. 456; Murphy, no. 2,003; D’Avezac, Géographes Grecs et Latins, p. 13). It was called Cosmographia in the edition of 1498 (Bibl. Amer. Vet., Additions, no. 8; Huth, iv. 1166); De orbis situ in that of Venice, 1502; De totius orbis descriptione in the Paris edition of 1507, edited by Geofroy Tory (A. J. Bernard’s Geofroy Tory, premier imprimeur royal, Paris, 1865, p. 81; Carter-Brown, i. 32; Muller, 1872, no. 2,318; 1877, no. 2,062).

VADIANUS.

Fac-simile of a cut in Reusner’s Icones (Strasburg, 1590), p. 162.

In 1512 the text of Mela came under new influences. Henry Stevens (Bibliotheca geographica, p. 210) and others have pointed out how a circle of geographical students at this time were making Vienna a centre of interest by their interpretation of the views of Mela and of Solinus, a writer of the third century, whose Polyhistor is a description of the world known to the ancients. Within this knot of cosmographers, John Camers undertook the editing of Mela; and his edition, De situ orbis, was printed by Jean Singrein at Vienna in 1512, though it bears neither place nor date (Stevens, Bibliotheca geographica, no. 1,825; D’Avezac, Géographes Grecs et Latins, p. 14; Leclerc, no. 457; Sunderland, no. 10,119). Another Mela of the same year (1512) is known to have been printed by Weissenburger, presumably at Nuremberg, and edited by Johannes Cocleius as Cosmographia Pomponii Mele: authoris nitidissimi tribus libris digesta: ... compendio Johannis Coclei Norici adaucta quo geographie principia generaliter comprehēduntur (Weigel, 1877, no. 227; there is a copy in Charles Deane’s library). In 1517 Mela made a part of the collection of Antonie Francino at Florence, which was reissued in 1519 and 1526 (D’Avezac, p. 16; Sunderland, nos. 10,121, 10,122).

Meanwhile another student, Joachim Watt, a native of St. Gall, in Switzerland, now about thirty years old, who had been a student of Camers, and who is better known by the latinized form of his name, Vadianus, had, in November, 1514, addressed a letter to Rudolfus Agricola, in which he adopted the suggestion first made by Waldseemüller that the forename of Vespucius should be applied to that part of the New World which we now call Brazil. This letter was printed at Vienna (1515) in a little tract,—Habes, Lector, hoc libello, Rudolphi Agricolæ Junioris Rheti ad Jochimum Vadianum epistolam,—now become very rare. It contains also the letter of Agricola, Sept. 1, 1514, which drew out the response of Vadianus dated October 16,—Agricola on his part referring to the work on Mela which was then occupying Vadianus (a copy owned by Stevens, Bibliotheca geographica, no. 2,799, passed into the Huth Library, Catalogue, v. 1506. Harrassowitz has since priced a copy, Catalogue, List 61, no. 57, at 280 marks).

The De situ orbis of Mela, as edited by Vadianus, came out finally in 1518, and contained one of the two letters,—that of Vadianus himself; and it is in this reproduction that writers have usually referred to its text (Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 92; Murphy, no. 2,004; Leclerc, no. 458; Sunderland, no. 10,120; Graesse, v. 401; Carter-Brown, i. 55). Camers also issued at the same time an edition uniform with the Aldine imprint of Solinus; and this and the Mela are often found bound together. Two years later (1520) copies of the two usually have bound up between them the famous cordiform map of Apian (Petrus Apianus, in the Latin form; Dienewitz, in his vernacular). This for a long time was considered the earliest engraved map to show the name of America, which appeared, as the annexed fac-simile shows, on the representation of South America. There may be some question if the map equally belongs to the Mela and to the Solinus, for the two in this edition are usually bound together; yet in a few copies of this double book, as in the Cranmer copy in the British Museum, and in the Huth copy (Catalogue, iv. 1372), there is a map for each book. There are copies of the Solinus in the Carter-Brown, Lenox, Harvard College, Boston Public, and American Antiquarian Society libraries (cf. Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, p. 175; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 108; Murphy, no. 2,338; Trübner, 1876, £15 15s.; Weigel, 1877, 240 marks; Calvary, 1883, 250 marks; Leclerc, 1881, no. 2,686, 500 francs; Ellis & White, 1877, £25). The inscription on the map reads: “Tipus orbis universalis juxta Ptolomei cosmographi traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliosque lustrationes a Petro Apiano Leysnico elucbrat. An. Do. M.D.XX.” Harrisse (Bibl. Amer. Vet., Additions, no. 68) cites from Varnhagen’s Postface aux trois livraisons sur Vespucci, a little tract of eight leaves, which is said to be an exposition of the map to accompany it, called Declaratio et usus typi cosmographici, Ratisbon, 1522. The map was again used in the first complete edition of Peter Martyr’s Decades, when the date was changed to “M.D.XXX” (Carter-Brown, i. 94; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 154; Kunstmann, Entdeckung Amerikas, p. 134; Kohl, Die beiden ältesten General-Karten von Amerika, p. 33; Uricoechea, Mapoteca Colombiana, no. 4). Vadianus meanwhile had quarrelled with Camers, and had returned to St. Gall, and now re-edited his Mela, and published it at Basle in 1522 (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 112; Murphy, no. 2,004**; Carter-Brown, i. 590; Leclerc, no. 459).

In 1524 Apianus published the first edition of his cosmographical studies,—a book that for near a century, under various revisions, maintained a high reputation. The Cosmographicus liber was published at Landshut in 1524,—a thin quarto with two diagrams showing the New World, in one of which the designation is “Ameri” for an island; in the other, “America.” Bibliographers differ as to collation, some giving fifty-two, and others sixty leaves; and there are evidently different editions of the same year. The book is usually priced at £5 or £6. Cf. Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, p. 174; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 127, and Additions, p. 87; Carter-Brown, i. 78; Huth, i. 39; Murphy, no. 93; Sabin, no. 1,738. There is an account of Apianus (born 1495; died 1551 or 1552) in Clement’s Bibliographie curieuse (Göttingen, 1750-1760). It is in chapter iv. of part ii. of the Cosmographicus liber that America is mentioned; but there is no intimation of Columbus having discovered it. Where “Isabella aut Cuba” is spoken of, is an early instance of conferring the latter name on that island, after La Cosa’s use of it.

PART OF APIANUS’S MAP, 1520.

There are fac-similes of the entire map in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 69, and in Santarem’s Atlas; and on a much reduced scale in Daly’s Early Cartography. Cf. Varnhagen’s Jo. Schöner e P. Apianus: Influencia de um e outro e de varios de seus contemporaneos na adopçăo do nome America; primeiros globos e primeiros mappas-mundi com este nome; globo de Waltzeemüller, e plaquette acerca do de Schöner, Vienna, 1872, privately printed, 61 pp., 100 copies (Murphy Catalogue, no. 2,231; Quaritch prices it at about £1). A recent account of the history of the Vienna presses, Wiens Buchdruckergeschichte (1883), by Anton Mayer, refers to the edition of Solinus of 1520 (vol. i. pp. 38, 41), and to the editions of Pomponius Mela, edited by Vadianus, giving a fac-simile of the title (p. 39) in one case.

Santarem gives twenty-five editions of Ptolemy between 1511 and 1584 which do not bear the name of America, and three (1522, 1541, and 1552) which have it. Cf. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris (1837), vol. viii.

In 1529 a pupil of Apianus, Gemma Frisius, annotated his master’s work, when it was published at Antwerp, while an abridgment, Cosmographiæ introductio, was printed the same year (1529) at Ingoldstadt (Sabin, no. 1,739; Court, no. 21; Bibl. Amer. Vet., nos. 148, 149, and Additions, no. 88. There is a copy of the abridgment in Harvard College Library).

The third edition of Mela, cum commentariis Vadiani appeared at Paris in 1530, but without maps (cf. Carter-Brown, i. 97; Muller, 1877, no. 2,063; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 157); and again in 1532. (Sunderland, no. 10,124; Harrassowitz, list 61, no. 60).

It is not necessary to follow, other than synoptically, the various subsequent editions of these three representative books, with brief indications of the changes that they assumed to comport with the now rapidly advancing knowledge of the New World.

1533. Apianus, full or abridged, in Latin, at Venice, at Freiburg, at Antwerp, at Ingoldstadt, at Paris (Carter-Brown, i. 591; Bibl. Amer. Vet., nos. 179, 202, and Additions, no. 100; Sabin, nos. 1,742, 1,757. Some copies have 1532 in the colophon). Apianus printed this year at Ingoldstadt various tracts in Latin and German on the instruments used in observations for latitude and longitude (Stevens, Bibliotheca geographica, no. 173, etc). Vadianus, in his Epitome trium terræ partium, published at Tiguri, described America as a part of Asia (Weigel, 1877, no. 1,574). He dated his preface at St. Gall, “VII. Kallen. August, M. D. XXXIII.”

1534. Apianus in Latin at Venice (Bibl. Amer. Vet., Additions, no. 106). The Epitome of Vadianus in folio, published at Tiguri, with a map, “Typus cosmographicus universalis, Tiguri, anno M. D. XXXIIII,” which resembles somewhat that of Finæus, representing the New World as an island approaching the shape of South America. The Carter-Brown copy has no map (cf. Huth, v. 1508; Leclerc, no. 586, 130 francs; Carter-Brown, i. 112; Weigel, 1877, no. 1,576; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 189). An edition in octavo, without date, is held to be of the same year. It is usually said to have no map; but Quaritch (no. 12,475) has advertised a copy for £4,—“the only copy he had ever seen containing the map.” The Huth Catalogue, v. 1508, shows a copy with twelve woodcut maps of two leaves each, and four single leaves of maps and globes. The part pertaining to America in this edition is pages 544-564, “Insulæ Oceani præcipuæ,” which is considered to belong to the Asiatic continent (cf. Stevens, 1870, no. 2,179; Muller, 1872, no. 1,551; 1877, no. 3,293; Weigel, 1877, no. 1,575).

1535. Apianus, in Latin, at Venice (Sabin, no. 1,743; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 202). Vadianus, in Latin, at Antwerp. (Bibl. Amer. Vet., 209; Huth, v. 1508; Court, no. 360).

1536. An edition of Mela, De situ orbis, without place and date, was printed at Basle, in small octavo, with the corrections of Olive and Barbaro. Cf. D’Avezac, Géographes Grecs et Latins, p. 20; Sunderland, no. 10,123; Weigel (1877), p. 99.

1537. The first Dutch edition of Apianus, De cosmographie rā Pe Apianus, Antwerp, with woodcut of globe on the title. The first of two small maps shows America. It contains a description of Peru. Cf. Carter-Brown, i. 121; Muller (1875), no. 2,314.

1538. Mela and Solinus, printed by Henri Petri at Basle with large and small maps, one representing the New World to the east of Asia as “Terra incognita.” Cf. Harrassowitz (1882), no. 91, p. 2, 60 marks; D’Avezac, p. 21.

1539. An edition of Mela, De orbis situ, at Paris (Sunderland, no. 10,124). Apianus’s Cosmographia per Gemmam Phrysium restituta, in small quarto, was published at Antwerp by A. Berckman. A globe on the titlepage shows the Old World. It has no other map (Carter-Brown, i. 124; Sabin, no. 1,744; Bibl. Amer. Vet., nos. 229, 230).

1540. An edition of Mela, issued at Paris, has the Orontius Finæus map of 1531, with the type of the Dedication changed. The Harvard College copy and one given in Harrassowitz’ Catalogue (81), no. 55, show no map. Cf. Leclerc, no. 460, 200 francs; Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 230, Additions, nos. 126, 127, 460; Court, no. 283; Rosenthal (1884), no. 51, at 150 marks. An edition of Apianus in Latin at Antwerp, without map; but Lelewel (Moyen-âge, pl. 46) gives a map purporting to follow one in this edition of Apianus. Cf. Carter-Brown, i. 125; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 230; Sabin, no. 1,745.

1541. Editions of Apianus in Latin at Venice and at Nuremberg. Cf. Bibl. Amer. Vet., nos. 235, 236; Sabin, nos. 1,746, 1,747.

1543. Mela and Solinus at Basle (D’Avezac, p. 21).

APIANUS.

This follows a fac-simile of an old cut given in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. 294.

1544. An edition of Apianus in French at Antwerp, with a map, which was used in various later editions. Cf. Sabin, no. 1,752; Carter-Brown, i. 592; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 253.

1545. Apianus, in Latin, at Antwerp, with the same map as in the 1544 French edition. Cf. Carter-Brown, i. 135; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 262; Muller (1875), no. 2,365 (1877), no. 158; Sabin, no. 1,748.

1548. Apianus in Spanish, Cosmographia augmentada por Gemma Frisio, at Antwerp, with the same folding map. Cf. Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 283; Sabin, no. 1,753; Carter-Brown, i. 147; Dufosse, no. 10,201, 45 francs; Quaritch (1878), no. 104, £6 6s.; Cat. hist. Brazil, Bibl. Nac. do Rio de Janeiro, no. 3. Apianus in Italian at Antwerp, Libro de la cosmographia de Pedro Apiano, with the same map. The Epitome of Vadianus, published at Tiguri, with double maps engraved on wood, contains one, dated 1546, showing America, which is reproduced in Santarem’s Atlas. Cf. Carter-Brown, i. 151; Bibl. Amer. Vet., nos. 170, 464, Additions, no. 104.

1550. Apianus in Latin at Antwerp, with map at folio 30, with additions by Frisius; and folios 30-48, on America (cf. Carter-Brown, i. 154; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 298; Murphy, no. 94; Sabin, no. 1,749; Muller, 1875, no. 2,366). Some bibliographers report Latin editions of this year at Amsterdam and Basle.

1551. Editions of Apianus at Paris, in Latin and French, with a folding map and two smaller ones,—a reprint of the Antwerp edition of 1550. The language of the maps is French in both editions (Court, no. 20). Clement (Bibliothèque curieuse, i. 404) gives 1553 as the date of the colophon. An edition of Mela and Solinus (D’Avezac, p. 21).

1553. Editions of Apianus in Latin at Antwerp and Paris, and in Dutch at Antwerp, with mappemonde and two small maps. Cf. Carter-Brown, i. 174, 594. Some copies have 1551 in the colophon, as does that belonging to Jules Marcou, of Cambridge. There is a copy of the Paris edition in the Boston Public Library, no. 2,285, 58.

1554. An abridged edition of Apianus, Cosmographiæ introductio, Venice. A copy in Harvard College Library.

1556. An edition of Mela, at Paris (Sunderland, no. 10,125).

1557. An edition of Mela, as edited by Vadianus, at Basle (D’Avezac, p. 21).

1561. A Dutch edition of Apianus, at Antwerp, without map. Cf. Carter-Brown, i. 597; Sabin, no. 1,754.

1564. An octavo edition of Vadianus’ Mela (D’Avezac, p. 21). A Latin edition of Apianus at Antwerp, with mappemonde.

1574. Latin editions of Apianus at Antwerp and Cologne, with a folding mappemonde (Carter-Brown, i. 296, 297; Sabin, no. 1,750).

1575. Spanish and Italian texts of Apianus published at Antwerp, with mappemonde, and descriptions of the New World taken from Gomara and Girava. Cf. Carter-Brown, i. 302; Sabin, no. 1,756; Clement, Bibliothèque curieuse, i. 405.

1576. Mela, as edited by Vadianus (D’Avezac, p. 21). With the Polyhistor of Solinus, published at Basle. The Harvard College copy has no map of America. Cf. Graesse, v. 402.

1577. Henri Estienne’s collection in quarto, containing Mela (D’Avezac, p. 24).

1581. Apianus in French, at Antwerp, with a folding mappemonde (p. 72). The part on America is pp. 155-187 (Murphy, no. 95).

1582. An edition of Mela edited by A. Schottus, published at Antwerp, with map by Ortelius (Sunderland, no. 10,126).

1584. The Cosmographia of Apianus and Frisius, called by Clement (Bibliothèque curieuse, i. 404) the best edition, published at Antwerp by Bellero, in two issues, a change in the title distinguishing them. It has the same map with the 1564 and 1574 editions, and the section on “Insulæ Americæ” begins on p. 157. Cf. Carter-Brown, i. 354, no map mentioned; Sabin, no. 1,751.

1585. An edition of Mela in English, translated by Arthur Golding, published at London as The Worke of Pomponius Mela, the Cosmographer, concerning the Situation of the World. The preface is dated Feb. 6, 1584, in which Golding promises versions of Solinus and Thevet. There is a copy in the Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

1592. A Dutch edition of Apianus, published at Antwerp (Sabin, no. 1,755).

1595. An edition of Mela, as edited by Vadianus, published at Basle (D’Avezac, p. 21).

1598. A Dutch edition of Apianus, published at Amsterdam, with folding map. Cf. Carter-Brown, i. 521; Muller (1877), no. 164.

1605. Mathias Bonhomme published an edition of Mela and Solinus (D’Avezac, p. 21).

1609. A Dutch edition of Apianus, printed at Antwerp, with mappemonde (Carter-Brown, ii. 76; Sabin, no. 1,755). Bonhomme’s edition of Mela and Solinus, reissued (D’Avezac, p. 21).

1615, etc. Numerous editions of Mela appeared subsequently: 1615 (Vadianus), Basle, 1619, 1625, 1626, 1635; at Madrid, 1642, 1644, in Spanish; Leyden, 1646, in Latin; and under different editors, 1658, 1685, and 1700, and often later.

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