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.”