According to the historical researches set forth in this first paper of a series on the discoveries and explorations of the Mississippi in various portions of its course, the river appears to have been earliest discovered and mapped at its mouth in a voyage of Pinzon and Solis, with Amerigo Vespucci as astronomer and cartographer, probably in March or April, 1498, less than six years from the first landfall of Columbus. Twenty-one years then passed before the Mississippi was next seen in the voyage of Pineda, in 1519, being reached by ascending a bayou from Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas. In 1528 one of the mouths of the Mississippi was seen in the forlorn last voyage of Narvaez; and in 1541 the river was crossed far above its mouth, by the ambitious but ill-fated expedition of De Soto, and after his death it was descended by the survivors in boats to the Gulf. Four times within a period of forty-three years, the Spaniards reached by sea and by land the lower part of the Mississippi. They sought gold or silver in vain, and the extreme disasters of the last two expeditions caused them to abandon their purpose of planting colonies and making this region a part of New Spain. The entire river, excepting its sources, was to be explored and owned by others, but much later, for acquiring wealth by commerce, and for extending the dominion of France.
More than a hundred years after De Soto, the Mississippi was re-discovered by Europeans, this time in its upper course, when Groseilliers and Radisson in 1655, with many Indian canoes, ascended it from near the Wisconsin river to Prairie Island, if I have rightly understood the narrative of Radisson; and they crossed it higher, at or near the site of Minneapolis, in 1660, when they went to visit the Prairie Sioux at the farthest limit of their second western expedition.
Halfway in time between De Soto and these men, a Spanish expedition under Oñate, coming from New Mexico in 1601, probably reached the Mississippi near the mouth of the Arkansas river; but we have only scanty records of this exploration, which some have ascribed to the year 1662, following a fictitious narrative that would make Peñalosa the leader.
Eighteen years after Groseilliers and Radisson’s first trip, Joliet and Marquette navigated the Mississippi for a long distance southward from the Wisconsin river, to the Arkansas; and again, after seven years more, in 1680, it was navigated between the Illinois and Rum rivers by Hennepin, and also, above the Wisconsin, by Du Luth. In 1682 La Salle led an expedition from the Illinois to the mouth of the Mississippi, and there proclaimed its vast drainage area to be the property of France. A few years later, about 1685–90, Le Sueur and his relative by marriage, Charleville, canoed from Lake Pepin far upward beyond the Falls of St. Anthony, probably to Sandy Lake; and in the last year of the seventeenth century, just forty-five years after Groseilliers superintended corn-raising by the Hurons on Prairie Island, Le Sueur and a large mining party navigated the whole extent of the Mississippi from near its mouth to the Minnesota river, and then advanced up that stream to the Blue Earth river.
Without seeking or suggestion by himself, the name of Amerigo Vespucci (also commonly known, in Latin, as Americus Vespucius) was bestowed upon the New World, of which, next after Columbus, he was the most notable discoverer in the sense of bringing to the knowledge of Europe what he saw in four voyages. Though not in command of these expeditions, Vespucci was a skilled geographer, and his services as astronomer and pilot were required to determine and chart their courses, with the newly discovered lands. His letters of description, written to friends without expectation of publication, were printed and proved to be of such popular interest that they passed through many editions and translations, leading to the adoption of the name America, after his death, on maps and globes. It was at first applied to Brazil, which Vespucci coasted on his second, third, and fourth voyages, and was later extended to both North and South America. In his first voyage, with four vessels, leaving Spain May 10, 1497, and returning October 15, 1498, he appears to have sailed along the shores of Honduras, Yucatan, the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and our southeastern seaboard north to Pamlico Sound.
Between Vespucci and Columbus a cordial and mutual friendship existed, and the Florentine pilot had no wish nor thought of taking away from the Genoese admiral any part of the honor and gratitude due to him. Both sailed in the service of Spain, but Vespucci also made two voyages for Portugal. It was a Latin book by a German geographer, Waldseemüller, published in the little college town of St. Dié, in a valley of the Vosges mountains in northeastern France, April 25, 1507, which first proposed the name America for the region described by Vespucci south of the equator. There was at that time no intention to include under it the countries farther north discovered and explored by Columbus, Cabot, and other navigators. Winsor and Fiske have traced very instructively the growth of European knowledge of the New World, whereby it was finally learned that all the coasts explored from Labrador to the strait of Magellan are connected parts of one vast continent, on which Mercator bestowed the single name America in 1541, twenty-nine years after Vespucci’s death.
Succeeding generations long imputed blame to Vespucci for this supplanting of Columbus in the name of the new continent; but either would have scorned to wrong the other, or to falsify or exaggerate intentionally in the narrations of their voyages. The personal honor of Vespucci has been vindicated by the researches of Alexander Humboldt and the Brazilian historian, Varnhagen; and the latter, in 1865 and 1869, well ascertained that Vespucci’s first voyage, made in 1497–98, concerning which much doubt and misunderstanding remained because of the lack of many details in the narration, was the source of the first mapping of Yucatan, the Gulf of Mexico, and Florida. In Vespucci’s chart of that very early date the Mississippi river was unmistakably delineated, with a three-mouthed delta projecting into the Gulf.
Varnhagen’s luminous researches, published between thirty and forty years ago, were brought more fully to the attention of readers of our English language by Hubert Howe Bancroft in 1883 (Central America, vol. I, pp. 99–107), and especially by John Fiske’s work, The Discovery of America, published in 1892. No official reports nor chart of Vespucci’s first voyage, which was probably under the commandership of Pinzon and Solis, are preserved; but two very early maps, evidently drafted in part from the chart of that expedition, still exist, and were essentially reproduced ten years ago by Harrisse, Winsor, and Fiske, in their elaborate discussions of the Columbian and later discoveries.
One of these two maps was drafted in 1502 by some unknown Portuguese cartographer for Alberto Cantino, an Italian envoy at Lisbon, and hence is called the Cantino map. It delineated crudely the southeastern coast of the United States from the “Rio de los Palmas” (River of Palms)—thought by Fiske to be the Apalachicola river—eastward around Florida and onward north to Pamlico Sound, according to my identification. The coast bears many names of rivers, capes, etc.; and the end of the Florida peninsula is called “C. do fim do Abrill” (Cape of the end of April), whence it is inferred that the expedition in which Vespucci sailed on his first voyage, whose chart supplied this part of the Cantino map, passed through the strait separating Florida from Cuba at the end of April, 1498. The west edge of this map is at its River of Palms, so that it fails to give any information of the part of the Gulf of Mexico farther west.
Comparing the Cantino map with our southeastern coast line, to determine how far Vespucci saw it, I recognize, in their order from south to north, Jupiter Inlet or Indian River Inlet, Cape Canaveral, the St. John’s river (or, probably better, Cumberland Sound and St. Mary’s river, or St. Andrew’s Sound, or the Altamaha), then Warsaw and Tybee capes and the Savannah river, Cape Romain, the Santee river, Winyah Bay and the Pedee river, Cape Fear, New River Inlet, Cape Lookout, the Neuse and Pamlico rivers, and Long Shoal Point (or Sandy or Stumpy Point), extending into the north part of Pamlico Sound. The coast is represented as wholly trending to the north, instead of its curvature to the northeast. Entering Pamlico Sound by Ocracoke Inlet (or whatever passage existed near there four hundred years ago), the ships were probably repaired for the homeward voyage at some very favorable harbor among the many along the exceedingly irregular landward side of this sound, or at some distance up either of its large tributary rivers. The chart failed to note the long beach ridge of sand which forms Cape Hatteras and separates the sound (“mar vaano”) from the ocean.