These enterprises aroused the attention of the King of Portugal, Emmanuel le Fortune, in whose service our traveller let himself be enrolled. He joined a squadron (May, 1501, to Sept. 1501) sent to reconnoitre the land of Santa Cruz, or Brazil, discovered April 22d, 1500, by the Portuguese Admiral Alvarez Cabral, who, while on his way to the Cape of Good Hope and the East-Indies, had been dragged westward by winds and currents. In this voyage Americus Vespucius passed the equator by a distance which he values at 52°. On this he boasts of having traversed one fourth of the world (40° lat. north of Lisbon to the equator 50° lat. south; total 90°, or the quarter of a meridian.) He gives a brilliant description of the inhabitants, of natural features in that region, and of southern constellations. The leader of this expedition is not known. One remarkable fact, the encounter at Cape Verd with the vessels of Alvarez Cabral, returning from Malabar to Lisbon, and the details which Vespucius received from a member of that expedition concerning the admiral's adventures in the Indies, and transmitted to Pierfrancesco de' Medici, [Footnote 195] prove the habitual veracity of the Florentine navigator, confirmed and attested in this instance by Portuguese documents. [Footnote 196]
[Footnote 195: Letter dated at Cape Verd, June 4th, 1501.]
[Footnote 196: Crit. Exam. vol. v. pp. 69-107 and 213-215.]
The fourth voyage, (June, 1503, to June, 1504,) made probably under the direction of Gonzalo Coelho, had an object which Americus extols beforehand without clearly explaining it: "I shall do many things," he writes to Medicis, "for the glory of God, the good of my country, and the perpetual commemoration of my name." It appears that the king of Portugal wished to discover a passage to the Indies further south than Brazil; and, if it be true that Vespucius had already penetrated to the fiftieth degree of southern latitude, he must have just missed giving his name to the straits, whose discovery twenty years later immortalized Magellan. But results disappointed these cherished hopes and anticipations. The incapacity of the commander-in-chief, whose name the narrator conceals while roundly abusing his presumption and folly, rendered it disastrous.
Emmanuel, occupied at that period with grand projects of conquest in Oriental India, abandoned all attempts directed to the West. Vespucius on his side, disgusted with the barren service of Portugal, lent ear to King Ferdinand's solicitations, and, with a facile change of patron not without precedent among his contemporaries, returned to Castile. We find him leaving Seville for Valladolid, where the court was assembled, bearing an introduction to Diego, son of Christopher Columbus, from the admiral himself. Columbus recommends him (February 5th, 1505) as a man "to whom fortune has been adverse, and who has not enjoyed the legitimate fruit of his labors."
He received a commission to equip a squadron destined to seek a western route to the "land of spices." But after two years of preparation, Ferdinand, wearied with dissensions with his son-in-law Philippe le Beau, abandoned the design. At all events, on the 2d of March, 1508, he appointed Americus Vespucius to be pilot-in-chief (piloto mayor) at Seville, with a salary of fifty thousand maravedis, with these duties: first, to make sure that the pilots understood the use of astrolabe and quadrant; second, to make out a table of positions, to bear the name of Padron real, and serve the sole purpose of fixing maritime routes; third, to oblige pilots after each voyage to explain, in the presence of the officers of La Casa de Contratacion and of the piloto mayor, the exact position of the newly discovered lands, and also any corrections in the bearings of coasts, in order that all necessary changes might be recorded in the Padron real.[Footnote 197]
[Footnote 197: Crit. Exam. vol. v. pp. 167, 168.]
It was while filling this eminent position that Americus Vespucius died at Seville, on the 22d of February, 1512, aged sixty-one years, without having made another voyage.