Not daring to misrepresent the facts in Andalusia, did Americus induce the editors in Lorraine to tell falsehoods at a distance, acting in his stead? Or, to speak more correctly, did he get them to decree to him the honors of the discovery, and suggest to them the name of America? We have absolutely no ground for the supposition. Nowhere do the numerous publications taking their origin from the Cosmography of Hylacomylus allude to any relation direct or indirect with the Florentine. If the maps of the editions of Ptolemaeus in 1513 and 1522, had resulted from interested suggestions on the part of Americus Vespucius, we should not find upon them, in large characters, the indication that the great southern country was discovered by Christopher Columbus, the Genoese. This southern country would assuredly have extended to that famous fiftieth degree of south latitude, of which Americus was so proud, instead of ending somewhere about the fortieth degree. The editors of 1513 would not have fallen into the singular blunder of making Ferdinand the Catholic, king of Portugal. Some explanation would be needed, too, of the impostor's having selected as an accomplice an obscure scholar in a still more obscure town of Lorraine, (which an eminent representative of the scientific world tried lately to locate in the depths of Hungary,) [Footnote 223] where he had many Italian friends to whom he would more naturally have addressed himself. And one might reasonably ask why the good people of Saint-Dié and Strasburg (whom one cannot know through their writings without conceiving a high opinion of their character and of their devotion to science) could have participated so coolly in a dishonest action, or even have entered hoodwinked into a snare spread for their ingenuousness—a snare, too, of which no trace remains.
[Footnote 223: Navarrete. Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 103.]
To this accusation consisting of gratuitous and baseless assertions, there is a crowd of real motives to be opposed.
It is far more natural to admit, taking into consideration the extreme difficulties of communication at that period, that the enthusiasm of Hylacomylus and his Strasburg neighbors was spontaneous. Such is certainly the character of the extracts we have presented to the reader. It is extremely probable that Americus Vespucius never saw the Cosmography of 1507 or the Globus of 1509, and that he was to the end unconscious of the dangerous honor bestowed upon him at Saint-Dié. As to the maps illustrated with his name, they appeared in 1520 and 1522, eight and ten years after his death.
But for the tyranny of habit, which demands a response, point for point, to charges once preferred against an individual, we should have suddenly adopted a more radical system, and have declared not only that Americus Vespucius did not entertain the vile and criminal intentions ascribed to him with regard to Christopher Columbus, but that, at the stage of ideas and of science existing in his day, he could not have conceived them.
In using the expression New World, or the fourth part of the world, we attach to it the precise sense of the vast American continent. Our eyes instinctively behold that colossal dike, which, stretching, so to speak, from pole to pole, restrains and divides the two oceans facing easterly toward Europe and Africa, and westerly toward Asia, but separated by enormous distances from all three.
We must set aside this preconceived idea, and return in thought to the latter days of the fifteenth century.
The ancients and the travellers of the middle ages prolonged Asia indefinitely eastward; and when at last they set a term to that country by India, the Mangi and Cathay, (China,) they continued it again by sowing in handfuls through the neighboring seas innumerable archipelagoes. It was while more especially acting upon the words of antiquity that Christopher Columbus braved the awful solitudes of the Atlantic, and, bearing directly westward, sought the Indies by another route than that used by the Portuguese. When the unknown land, the prize of his divination, rose from the bosom of the waters, the admiral never for an instant doubted that he was about to plant the standard of Castile upon an Asiatic island. He took Cuba for the very continent of Asia, the end and the beginning of the Indies. "I have discovered," wrote he to Pope Alexander VI. (February, 1502,) "333 leagues of the terra firma of Asia." On his third voyage, the spectacle of the immense flood of the Orinoco having suggested to him the very rational idea that such a river must belong to a large country, he made of it the India of the Ganges. In this conviction he lived and died.
In the same way Americus Vespucius, during his second voyage, coasting along the country destined to bear his name, fully believed himself to be in Asia. He tried to find Cape Cattigara in the great gulf of Ptolemaeus; [Footnote 224] and followed for 400 leagues a shore which was, he said, the end of Asia, by the eastern side, and the commencement by the western side. "This expedition has lasted thirteen months, during which we have run the greatest risks, and discovered an infinite stretch of the land of Asia as well as a number of islands." [Footnote 225] In passing over to the Portuguese service afterward, it was with a hope of pursuing his investigations, and of "finding the Island of Taprobana, (Ceylon,) situated between the sea of the Indus and the sea of the Ganges." His fourth had for its object the Molucca Islands, the land of spices, and Malacca.