On the 13th of May, 1501, a new Portuguese fleet of three ships, under the command of Gonçalo Coelho, sailed from Lisbon to develop the coast of the southern Vera Cruz, as South America was now called, and to see if a way could be found through it to the Moluccas. In June, the fleet, while at the Cape de Verde Islands, met Cabral with his vessels on their return from India. Here it was that Cabral's interpreter, Gasparo, communicated the particulars of Cabral's discovery to Vespucius, who was, as seems pretty clear, though by no means certain, on board this outward-bound fleet. A letter exists, brought to light by Count Baldelli Boni, not, however, in the hand of Vespucius, in which the writer, under date of June 4, gave the results of his note-takings with Cabral to Pier Francisco de Medici. Varnhagen is in some doubt about the genuineness of this document. Indeed, the historian, if he weighs all the testimony that has been adduced for and against the participancy of Vespucius in this voyage, can hardly be quite sure that the Florentine was aboard at all, and Santarem is confident he was not. Navarrete thinks he was perhaps there in some subordinate capacity. Humboldt is staggered at the profession of Vespucius in still keeping the Great Bear above the horizon at 32° south, since it is lost after reaching 26°.
The Mundus Novus of Vespucius.
With all this doubt, we have got to make something out of another letter, which in the published copy purports to have been written in 1503 about this voyage by Vespucius himself, and from it we learn that his ship had struck the coast at Cape St. Roque, on August 17, 1501. The discoverers reached and named Cape St. Augustine on August 28. On November 1, they were at Bahia. By the 3d of April, 1502, they had reached the latitude of 52° south, when, driven off the coast in a severe gale, they made apparently the island of Georgia, whence they stood over to Africa, and reached Lisbon on September, 7, 1502. By what name Vespucius called this South American coast we do not know, for his original Italian text is lost, but the Mundus Novus of the Latin paraphrase or version raised a feeling of expectancy that something new had really been found, distinct from the spicy East. Varnhagen is convinced that Vespucius, different from Columbus, had awakened to the conception of an absolutely new quarter of the earth. There is little ground for the belief, however, in its full extent and confidence. The little tract had in it the elements of popularity, and in 1504 and 1505 the German and French presses gave it currency in several editions in the Latin tongue, whence it was turned into Italian, German, and Dutch, spreading through Europe the fame of Vespucius. We trace to this voyage the origin of the nomenclature of the coast of the South American continent which then grew up, and is represented in the earlier maps, like that of Lorenz Fries, for instance, in 1504.
MUNDUS NOVUS, first page.
Discoveries of Vespucius.
Maps of early voyages.
A letter dated August 12, 1507, preserved in Tritemius's Epistolarum familiarum libri duo (1536), has been thought to refer to a printed map which showed the discoveries of Vespucius down to 10° south. This map is unknown, apparently, as the particulars given concerning it do not agree with the map of Ruysch, the only one, so far as known, to antedate that epistle. It is possibly the missing map which Waldseemüller is thought to have first made, and which became the prototype of the recognized Waldseemüller map of the Ptolemy of 1513, and was possibly the one from which the Cantino map, yet to be described, was perfected in other parts than those of the Cortereal discoveries. This anterior map may have been merely an early state of the plate, and Lelewel gives reasons for believing that early impressions of this map were in the market in 1507.