WHILE Vespucius never once clearly affirms that he discovered the main, such an inference may be drawn from what he says. Peter Martyr gives no date at all for the voyage of Pinzon and Solis to the Honduras coast, which was later claimed by Oviedo and Gomara to have preceded that of Columbus to the main. Navarrete has pointed out the varied inconsistencies of the Vespucius narrative,[471] as well as the changes of the dates of the setting out and the return, as given in the various editions.[472] All of them give a period of twenty-nine months for a voyage which Vespucius says only took eighteen,—a difficulty Canovai and others have tried to get over by changing the date of return to 1498; and some such change was necessary to enable Vespucius to be in Spain to start again with Ojeda in May, 1499. Humboldt further instances a great variety of obvious typographical errors in the publications of that day,—as, for instance, where Oviedo says Columbus made his first voyage in 1491.[473] But, as shown in the preceding narrative, an allowance for errors of the press is not sufficient. In regard to the proof of an alibi which Humboldt brought forward from documents said to have been collected by Muñoz from the archives of the Casa de la Contratacion, it is unfortunate that Muñoz himself did not complete that part of his work which was to pertain to Vespucius, and that the documents as he collated them have not been published. In the absence of such textual demonstration, the inference which Humboldt drew from Navarrete’s representations of those documents has been denied by Varnhagen; and H. H. Bancroft in his Central America (i. 99, 102, 106) does not deem the proof complete.[474]
Vespucius’ own story for what he calls his second voyage (1499) is that he sailed from Cadiz shortly after the middle of May, 1499. The subsequent dates of his being on the coast are conflicting; but it would appear that he reached Spain on his return in June or September, 1500. We have, of course, his narrative of this voyage in the collective letter to Soderini;[475] but there is also an independent narrative, published by Bandini (p. 64) in 1745, said to have been written July 18, 1500, and printed from a manuscript preserved in the Riccardiana at Florence.[476] The testimony of Ojeda that Vespucius was his companion in the voyage of 1499-1500 seems to need the qualification that he was with him for a part, and not for the whole, of the voyage; and it has been advanced that Vespucius left Ojeda at Hispaniola, and, returning to Spain, sailed again with Pinzon in December, 1499,—thus attempting to account for the combination of events which seem to connect Vespucius with the voyages of both these navigators.
It is noteworthy that Oviedo, who sought to interpret Peter Martyr as showing that Solis and Pinzon had preceded Columbus to the main, makes no mention of Vespucius. There is no mention of him in what Beneventano furnished to the Ptolemy of 1508. Castanheda does not allude to him, nor does Barreiros in his De Ophira regione (Coimbra, 1560), nor Galvano in his Descobrimientos, nor Pedro Magalhaes de Gandavo in his account of Santa Cruz (1576).[477]
But it was not all forgetfulness as time went on. The currency to his fame which had been given by the De orbe antarctica, by the Paesi novamente, by the Cosmographiæ introductio, as well as by the Mundus novus and the publications which reflected these, was helped on in 1510 by the Roman archæologist Francesco Albertini in his Opusculum de mirabilibus Urbis Romæ, who finds Florence, and not Genoa, to have sent forth the discoverer of the New World.[478]
Two years later (1512) an edition of Pomponius Mela which Cocleus edited, probably at Nuremberg, contained, in a marginal note to a passage on the “Zona incognita,” the following words: “Verus Americus Vesputius iam nostro seculo | novū illū mundū invenissefert Portugalie Castilieq. regū navibus,” etc. Pighius in 1520 had spoken of the magnitude of the region discovered by Vespucius, which had gained it the appellation of a new world.[479] The references in Glareanus, Apian, Phrysius, and Münster show familiarity with his fame by the leading cosmographical writers of the time. Natale Conti, in his Universæ historiæ sui temporis libri XXX (1545-1581), brought him within the range of his memory.[480] In 1590 Myritius, in his Opusculum geographicum, the last dying flicker, as it was, of a belief in the Asian connection of the New World,[481] repeats the oft-told story,—“De Brasilia, terrâ ignis, de meridionali parte Africæ ab Alberico Vesputio inventa.”
In the next century the story is still kept up by the Florentine, Francesco Bocchi, in his Libri duo elogiorum (1607),[482] and by another Florentine, Raffael Gualterotti, in a poem, L’ America (1611),[483]—not to name many others.[484]
But all this fame was not unclouded, and it failed of reflection in some quarters at least. The contemporary Portuguese pilots and cosmographers give no record of Vespucius’ eminence as a nautical geometrician. The Portuguese annalist Damião de Goes makes no mention of him. Neither Peter Martyr nor Benzoni allows him to have preceded Columbus. Sebastian Cabot, as early as 1515, questioned if any faith could be placed in the voyage of 1497 “which Americus says he made.” It is well known that Las Casas more than intimated the chance of his being an impostor; nor do we deduce from the way that his countrymen, Guicciardini[485] and Segni, speak of him, that their faith in the prior claim in his behalf was stable.
An important contestant appeared in Herrera in 1601,[486] who openly charged Vespucius with falsifying his dates and changing the date of 1499 to 1497; Herrera probably followed Las Casas’ manuscripts which he had.[487] The allegation fell in with the prevalent indignation that somebody, rather than a blind fortune, had deprived Columbus of the naming of the New World; and Herrera helped this belief by stating positively that the voyage of Pinzon and Solis, which had been depended upon to antedate Columbus, had taken place as late as 1506.
In the last century Angelo Maria Bandini attempted to stay this tide of reproach in the Vita e lettere di Amerigo Vespucci, gentiluomo fiorentino, which was printed at Florence in 1745.[488] It was too manifestly an unbounded panegyric to enlist the sympathy of scholars. More attention was aroused[489] by an address, with equal adulation, which Stanislao Canovai delivered to the Academy at Cortona in 1788, and which was printed at once as Elogio di Amerigo Vespucci, and various times afterward, with more or less change, till it appeared to revive anew the antagonism of scholars, in 1817.[490] Muñoz had promised to disclose the impostures of Vespucius, but his uncompleted task fell to Santarem, who found a sympathizer in Navarrete; and Santarem’s labored depreciation of Vespucius first appeared in Navarrete’s Coleccion,[491] where Canovai’s arguments are examined at length, with studied refutations of some points hardly worth the labor. This paper was later expanded, as explained in another place.