MERCATOR, 1541.
This is the configuration of Mercator’s gores (for a globe) reduced to Mercator’s subsequently-devised projection.
That the name went beyond that coast came of one of those shaping tendencies which are without control. “It was,” as Humboldt says,[608] “accident, and not fraud and dissensions, which deprived the continent of America of the name of Columbus.” It was in 1541, and by Mercator in his printed gores for a globe, that in a cartographical record we first find the name America extended to cover the entire continent; for he places the letters AME at Baccalaos, and completed the name with RICA at the La Plata.[609] Thus the injustice was made perpetual; and there seems no greater instance of the instability of truth in the world’s history. Such monstrous perversion could but incite an indignation which needed a victim,—and it found him in Vespucius. The intimation of Schöner was magnified in time by everybody, and the unfortunate date of 1497, as well as the altogether doubtful aspect of his Quattuor navigationes, helped on the accusation. Vespucius stood in every cyclopædia and history as the personification of baseness and arrogance;[610] and his treacherous return for the kindness which Columbus did him in February, 1505, when he gave him a letter of recommendation to his son Diego,[611] at a time when the Florentine stood in need of such assistance, was often made to point a moral. The most emphatic of these accusers, working up his case with every subsidiary help, has been the Viscount Santarem. He will not admit the possibility of Vespucius’ ignorance of the movement at St.-Dié. “We are led to the conclusion,” he says, in summing up, “that the name given to the new continent after the death of Columbus was the result of a preconceived plan against his memory, either designedly and with malice aforethought, or by the secret influence of an extensive patronage of foreign merchants residing at Seville and elsewhere, dependent on Vespucius as naval contractor.”[612]
It was not till Humboldt approached the subject in the fourth and fifth volumes of his Examen critique de l’histoire et de la géographie du nouveau monde that the great injustice to Vespucius on account of the greater injustice to Columbus began to be apparent. No one but Santarem, since Humboldt’s time, has attempted to rehabilitate the old arguments. Those who are cautious had said before that he might pardonably have given his name to the long coast-line which he had tracked, but that he was not responsible for its ultimate expansion.[613] But Humboldt’s opinion at once prevailed, and he reviewed and confirmed them in his Cosmos.[614] Humboldt’s views are convincingly and elaborately enforced; but the busy reader may like to know they are well epitomized by Wiesener in a paper, “Améric Vespuce et Christophe Colomb: la véritable origine du nom d’Amérique,” which was published in the Revue des questions historiques (1866), i. 225-252, and translated into English in the Catholic World (1867), v. 611.
The best English authority on this question is Mr. R. H. Major, who has examined it with both thoroughness and condensation of statement in his paper on the Da Vinci map in the Archæologia, vol. xl., in his Prince Henry the Navigator (pp. 367-380),[615] and in his Discoveries of Prince Henry, chap. xiv. Harrisse in his Bibl. Amer. Vet., pp. 65, 94, enumerates the contestants on the question; and Varnhagen, who is never unjust to Columbus, traces in a summary way the progress in the acceptance of the name of America in his Nouvelles recherches sur les derniers voyages du navigateur Florentin. In German, Oscar Peschel in his Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen (book ii. chap. 13) has examined the matter with a scholar’s instincts. The subject was followed by M. Schoetter in a paper read at the Congrès des Américanistes at Luxemburg in 1877; but it is not apparent from the abstract of the paper in the Proceedings of that session (p. 357) that any new light was thrown upon the matter.
Professor Jules Marcou would drive the subject beyond the bounds of any personal associations by establishing the origin of the name in the native designation (Americ, Amerrique, Amerique) of a range of mountains in Central America;[616] and Mr. T. H. Lambert, in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (no. 1 of 1883), asks us to find the origin in the name given by the Peruvians to their country,—neither of which theories has received or is likely to receive any considerable acceptance.[617]
