[573] Pilgrimes, iv. 1433.
[574] Bancroft, Central America, i. 291.
[575] See p. 122.
[576] Humboldt (Cosmos, Eng. tr., ii. 420) particularly instances his descriptions of the coast of Brazil. For fifteen hundred years, as Humboldt points out (p. 660), naturalists had known no mention, except that of Adulis, of snow in the tropical regions, when Vespucius in 1500 saw the snowy mountains of Santa Marta. Humboldt (again in his Cosmos, Eng. tr., ii. 664, 667), according Vespucius higher literary acquirements than the other early navigators had possessed, speaks of his extolling not ungracefully the glowing richness of the light and picturesque grouping and strange aspect of the constellations that circle the Southern Pole, which is surrounded by so few stars,—and tells how effectively he quoted Dante at the sight of the four stars, which were not yet for several years to be called the Southern Cross. Irving speaks of Vespucius’ narrative as “spirited.”
[577] Harrisse, no. 60; Brunet, ii. 319.
[578] Harrisse, Fernand Colomb, p. 145.
[579] Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 62; Additions, no. 31; Huth, v. 1,526; Varnhagen, Amerigo Vespucci, p. 31. Cf. Navarrete, Opúsculos, i. 94.
[580] Equally intended, as Varnhagen (Le premier voyage, p. 36), thinks to be accompanied by the Latin of the Quattuor navigationes.
[581] This little black-letter quarto contains fourteen unnumbered leaves, and the woodcut on the title is repeated on Bii, verso, E, recto, and Eiiii, verso. There are five other woodcuts, one of which is repeated three times. Harrisse (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 61; also p. 462) reports only the Harvard College copy, which was received from Obadiah Rich in 1830. There are other entries of this tract in Panzer, vi. 44, no. 149, under Argentorati (Strasburg), referring to the Crevenna Catalogue, ii. 117; Sabin, vii. 286; Grenville Catalogue, p. 480; Graesse, iii. 94; Henry Stevens’s Historical Nuggets, no. 1,252, pricing a copy in 1862 at £10 10s.; Harrassowitz (81, no. 48), pricing one at 1,000 marks; Huth, ii. 602; Court, no. 145; Bibliotheca Thottiana, v. 219; and Humboldt refers to it in his Examen critique, vi. 142, and in his introduction to Ghillany’s Behaim, p. 8, note. Cf. also D’Avezac’s Waltzemüller, p. 114; Major’s Prince Henry the Navigator, p. 387, and his paper in the Archæologia, vol. xl.; Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, p. 173. D’Avezac used a copy in the Mazarine Library. A German translation, printed also by Grüninger at Strasburg, appeared under the title, Der Welt Kugel, etc. (Bibl. Amer. Vet., Additions, no. 32.) Varnhagen (Le premier voyage, p. 36) thinks this German text the original one.
[582] Cf. Harrisse, Cabots, 182; D’Avezac, Allocution à la Société de Geographie de Paris, Oct. 20, 1871, p. 16; and his Waltzemüller, p. 116.