He claims that one hundred thousand documents in the Royal Archives of Portugal, and the register of maps which belonged to King Emmanuel, make no mention of Vespucius,[492] and that there is no register of the letters-patent which Vespucius claimed to have received. Nor is there any mention in several hundred other contemporary manuscripts preserved in the great library at Paris, and in other collections, which Santarem says he has examined.[493]
An admirer of Vespucius, and the most prominent advocate of a belief in the disputed voyage of 1497, is Francisco Adolpho de Varnhagen, the Baron de Porto Seguro. As early as 1839, in notes to his Diario of Lopez de Souza, he began a long series of publications in order to counteract the depreciation of Vespucius by Ayres de Cazal, Navarrete, and Santarem. In 1854, in his Historia geral do Brazil, he had combated Humboldt’s opinion that it was Pinzon with whom Vespucius had sailed on his second voyage, and had contended for Ojeda. Varnhagen not only accepts the statements of the St.-Dié publications regarding that voyage, but undertakes to track the explorer’s course. In his Amerigo Vespucci, son caractère, etc., he gives a map marking the various voyages of the Florentine.[494] For the voyage of 1497 he makes him strike a little south of west from the Canaries; but leaving his course a blank from the mid-Atlantic, he resumes it at Cape Gracias a Dios on the point of Honduras,[495] and follows it by the coast thence to the Chesapeake, when he passes by Bermuda,[496] and reaches Seville. In this he departs from all previous theories of the landfall, which had placed the contact on the coast of Paria. He takes a view of the Ruysch map[497] of 1508 different from that of any other commentator, in holding the smaller land terminated with a scroll to be not Cuba, but a part of the main westerly, visited by Vespucius in this 1497 voyage; and recently Harrisse, in his Cortereal,[498] argues that the descriptions of Vespucius in this disputed voyage correspond more nearly with the Cantino map[499] than with any other. Harrisse also asks if Waldseemüller did not have such a map as Cantino’s before him; and if the map of Vespucius, which Peter Martyr says Fonseca had, may not have been the same?
Varnhagen, as might be expected in such an advocate, turns every undated incident in Vespucius’ favor if he can. He believes that the white-bearded men who the natives said preceded the Spaniards were Vespucius and his companions. A letter of Vianello, dated Dec. 28, 1506, which Humboldt quotes as mentioning an early voyage in which La Cosa took part, but hesitates to assign to any particular year, Varnhagen eagerly makes applicable to the voyage of 1497.[500] The records of the Casa de la Contratacion which seem to be an impediment to a belief in the voyage, he makes to have reference, not to the ships of Columbus, but to those of Vespucius’ own command. Varnhagen’s efforts to elucidate the career of Vespucius have been eager, if not in all respects conclusive.[501]
We get upon much firmer ground when we come to the consideration of the voyage of 1501,—the first for Portugal, and the third of Vespucius’ so-called four voyages. It seems clear that this voyage was ordered by the Portuguese Government to follow up the chance discovery of the Brazil coast by Cabral in 1500, of which that navigator had sent word back by a messenger vessel. When the new exploring fleet sailed is a matter of uncertainty, for the accounts differ,—the Dutch edition of the account putting it as early as May 1, 1501, while one account places it as late as June 10.[502] When the fleet reached the Cape de Verde Islands, it found there Cabral’s vessels on the return voyage; and what Vespucius here learned from Cabral he embodied in a letter, dated June 4, 1501, which is printed by Baldelli in his Il Milione di Marco Polo, from a manuscript preserved in the Riccardiana Collection.[503] Some time in August—for the exact day is in dispute—he struck the coast of South America, and coursed southward,—returning to Lisbon Sept. 7, 1502.[504]
Vespucius now wrote an account of it, addressed to Lorenzo Piero Francesco de Medici,[505] in which he proposed a designation of the new regions, “novum mundum appellare licet.” Such is the Latin phraseology, for the original Italian text is lost.[506] Within the next two years numerous issues of Giocondo’s Latin text were printed, only two of which are dated,—one at Augsburg in 1504, the other at Strasburg in 1505; and, with a few exceptions, they all, by their published title, gave currency to the designation of Mundus novus.
The earliest of these editions is usually thought to be one Alberic’ vespucci’ laurētio petri francisci de medicis Salutem plurimā dicit, of which a fac-simile of the title is annexed, and which bears the imprint of Jehan Lambert.[507] It is a small plaquette of six leaves; and there are copies in the Lenox and Carter-Brown collections. D’Avezac, and Harrisse, in his later opinion (Additions, p. 19), agree in supposing this the first edition. The dated (1504) Augsburg edition, Mundus novus, is called “extraordinarily rare” by Grenville, who had a copy, now in the British Museum. On the reverse of the fourth and last leaf we read: “Magister Johānes otmar: vindelice impressit Auguste Anno millesimo quingentesimo quarto.” There are copies in the Lenox and Carter-Brown libraries.[508] An edition, Mundus novus, whose four unnumbered leaves, forty lines to the full page, correspond wholly with this last issue, except that for the dated colophon the words Laus Deo are substituted, was put at first by Harrisse[509] at the head of the list, with this title. There is a copy in the Lenox Library, which has another issue, Mundus novus, also in black-letter, forty-two lines to the page;[510] still another, Mundus novus, forty lines to the page;[511] and another, with the words Mundus novus in Roman, of eight leaves, thirty lines to the page.[512] At this point in his enumeration Harrisse placed originally the Jehan Lambert issue (mentioned above), and after it a Mundus novus printed in Paris by Denys Roce, of which only a fragment (five leaves) exists, sold in the Libri sale in London, 1865, and now in the British Museum.[513] Another Paris edition, Mundus novus, printed by Gilles de Gourmont, eight leaves, thirty-one lines to the page, is, according to Harrisse,[514] known only in a copy in the Lenox Library; but D’Avezac refers to a copy in the National Library in Paris.[515]
FIRST PAGE OF MUNDUS NOVUS.
Harrisse, no. 29. Cf. Navarrete, Opúsculos i. 99.