[14] From Navarrete's Coleccion de los Viajes y Descubrimientos.
XVI
HOW AMERICA WAS NAMED
1504-1541
If, in the foregoing narrative, the author has seemed to champion his hero unduly, going perhaps unnecessarily into the details of his voyages, it may have been owing to anticipated opposition on the part of his readers. There has always been a wide divergence of opinion respecting the merits of Amerigo Vespucci, and the world has never reconciled itself to his so-called usurpation of the glory rightly belonging to Columbus.
Even so great a writer as Emerson allowed himself to say: "Strange that broad America must wear the name of a thief! Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, who went out in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate, in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus, and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name!"
We, who have followed the career of Amerigo Vespucci from its beginning to its ending, know that he was not a thief; that—except by implication, as having been a purveyor of naval stores—he was not a "pickle-dealer"; that he held a far higher rank than boatswain's mate—as attested by the royal proclamation we have cited, naming him to be chief pilot of Spain; and that, so far as the evidence of his contemporaries and his own letters show, he made no attempt whatever to thrust his personality upon the world.
He did not "baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name," though it is true that the appellation by which a hemisphere is known to-day was derived from Americus, Amerigo, or Americo—whether we speak it in Latin, in Italian, or in Spanish.