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.