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]