by Hugh Thomas
La Cosa and Ledesma sailed on until they reached the unhealthy Bay of Urabá, on what is now the hinge between Colombia and Panama. An Indian anxious to please showed them a town recently abandoned by a local cacique, who had left behind in a basket some kettledrums of pure gold and six gold masks.
Returning to Cartagena, they discovered that one of Luis Guerra’s ships, captained by a certain Monroy—who came, no doubt, from a bastard branch of the wild family of that name in Extremadura—had been wrecked. Luis Guerra had long ago left for Spain. La Cosa and his friends went to help Monroy, but they, too, soon met trouble, and la Cosa’s own ships ran aground. The commander gave orders that everything savable should be taken ashore, where a settlement of perhaps two hundred Castilians was temporarily established. They sought to arrange a means of sustenance, but even in those conditions, did not forget the search for gold; as Oviedo put it, “One cannot eat it, but it gives pleasure and the hope of eventual rest.”37
But, all the same, these early involuntary Spanish settlers of what became in the end Colombia suffered from terrible shortages of food, and month after month went by without relief. In the end, Juan de la Cosa and Juan de Ledesma set off eastward in two brigantines with the entire colony, and some small boats in which the ill and suffering traveled, under the direction of Martín de los Reyes. Before leaving Urabá, the Spaniards buried their heavy equipment, such as anchors, lances, a few lombards, and crossbows. They assumed that they or other Spaniards would return.
The winds were hostile, progress was slow, morale low, food still short, the death rate high. Oviedo tells us that three Spaniards caught and killed an Indian and ate him, receiving a reprimand from la Cosa but no punishment.38 A fresh wind divided the little fleet. One small boat was swept to Cuba, while the brigantines found themselves on the shores of Jamaica, presumably on the south coast near what is now Kingston. La Cosa went on one of his vessels with the sick to Santo Domingo, under a captain, Juan de Quecedo, and a pilot, Andrés de Morales, while twenty-five more or less healthy Spaniards remained in Jamaica to be rescued later, though not without further mishaps. For example, in order to frighten the Indians who were pressing them, la Cosa agreed to burn a house in an indigenous town, but the fire spread, fanned by wind, and the settlement went up in flames.
20
“Call this other place Amerige”
Since Europe and Asia have received the names of women, I see no reason why we should not call this other place Amerige or America, after the wise man who discovered it.
The cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, 1508
To discuss how to take best advantage of these lands, which suddenly began to seem without limit, a meeting was held in 1508 at Burgos, in the Bishop’s Palace. Present were the King, Bishop Fonseca, and several important mariner-explorers, including the experienced Juan de la Cosa, Juan Díaz de Solís of Lepe (who, it turned out, had once sailed in the East in the service of Portugal), Vicente Yáñez de Pinzón of Palos, the great survivor of Columbus’s expeditions, and the Florentine Sevillano Amerigo Vespucci.
Vespucci had been on a long journey since he had last been seen at the Spanish court in 1501. For he had gone in 1502 to Brazil in the service of King Manuel of Portugal. It would seem right to dwell for a moment on his life, since his Christian name at least has become so well known.
The Vespuccis were among the most successful of Florentine families, with a fine property outside the city at Peretola, a village now ruined by the establishment there of an international airport. They had made money in the silk trade. The Vespuccis had a palace in Florence, conveniently sited to the northwest, near the Porta del Prato (then known as the Porto della Cana) in the district of Santa Lucia di Ognissanti. Members of the family had held important offices in Florence over several generations; for example, another Amerigo, in the mid-fifteenth century, had been chancellor of the Signoria, and his son Nastagio (Anastasio) held the same office.
In 1472, Nastagio commissioned the youthful Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint a picture dedicated to St. Elizabeth of Portugal (the art historian Vasari recounts it was his first commission). In the center is the Madonna of Mercy, Misericordia, and around her are portraits of the donors, members of the family. The picture was intended for the Vespucci Chapel, which later became the church of San Salvadore d’Ognissanti. Here we can see Nastagio’s brother, the priest Giorgio, a “mirror of Florentine piety and probity,” a collector of books, a scholar, and a humanist; and Nastagio’s sons, including Antonio, who followed his ancestors by becoming an official in the Signoria; a notary, Girolamo; a future wool merchant, Bernardo; and looking directly forward, as if he were a painter in a self-portrait, the eighteen-year-old Amerigo Vespucci, named after his grandfather. This Amerigo studied under the direction of his uncle Giorgio, who in turn talked to him of Ptolemy and Aristotle, and he probably met Toscanelli, the Florentine geographer and merchant whose correspondents had included both the King of Portugal and Columbus.
Some of the Vespuccis had already taken to the sea (one cousin, Bernardo, had been captain of a Florentine galley; another, Piero, had been commander of a Florentine fleet that fought against the corsairs of North Africa); and another cousin, Marco, was married to the beautiful Simonetta, the beloved of Giuliano de’ Medici and probably Botticelli’s model for the Birth of Venus and the Primavera.
The young Amerigo started his career first in Paris as private secretary to yet another cousin, Guidantonio Vespucci, the Florentine ambassador there, and later he went to Rome and Milan in the same capacity. Then Guidantonio became the chief magistrate, or gonfaloniere, of Florence. But Amerigo began to work for the younger branch of the Medici family, at that time headed by the youthful Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici and his brother Giovanni. He traveled on business to different parts of Italy and made several visits to Spain before settling in Seville in the autumn of 1492, while Columbus was away on his first voyage.1
In the following years, Amerigo collaborated with Juanotto Berardi, his “special friend,” and an associate of the Medici since 1489. According to one of Amerigo’s biographers, his ambition “had been fired by what Columbus had attempted”—and failed, as he believed—to do: to find a western passage to India. Hence his participation (already noted) in the expedition of Alonso de Hojeda in 1499 to 1500; and hence his acceptance of a commission to follow the coast of the South American continent, on the orders of the King of Portugal, between May 1501 and the summer of 1502. He then sailed down the Brazilian coast from what he named Cape San Rocco (where he was on August 16) past Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, to Cananor (which he reached in January 1502). That, he decided, was the farthest point west to which, by the Treaty of Tordesillas with Spain, the Portuguese could aspire. He then sailed on south toward the River Plate, in the Spanish zone of influence.
When Vespucci returned from Brazil, he declared that the land along which he had sailed extended much too far south for it to be India. He wrote to Pierfrancesco from Lisbon: “We arrived at a new land which, for many reasons that are enumerated in what follows, we observed to be a continent.” He was sure that he had found a quite new land, not just an eastern extension of Asia.2 He could henceforward have argued that what Columbus had found was in truth a new hemisphere that blocked the way to Asia by the west, unless a passage could be found through it. This astonishing new development was first realized in Lisbon, and there the court, the cartographers, and the merchants soon took this into consideration. Thus the excellent Portolano Map of 1502 shows the new continent in two unconnected sections. Asia ended with another ocean that would lie between it and “the New World.” It also showed that Cuba, island or no, was definitely not a part of Asia.
Vespucci returned to Seville. A Florentine merchant friend, Piero Rondinelli, wrote that he had “endured labor enough and has had little profit.”
It was later said that Vespucci wrote two more letters: one, Mundus Novus, was allegedly to his friend Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. This was published in 1
504 and purported to be an account of his activities in the New World. It was a mixture of inaccurate and false statements, with a few scientifically peculiar observations. It also contains some vulgarisms untypical of Vespucci’s style. That it was addressed to someone whom Amerigo Vespucci knew to have been dead at the time of writing should have put people on their guard. By that time, after all, Vespucci was famous. The Signoria of Florence had ordered that the house in which he had been born should be lit up for three nights, while the Vespucci family were to be allowed to attach a beacon to their residences. A letter purporting to be by him would surely sell well. Indeed, Mundus Novus did so.
Another letter was published a month later, in September 1504. This took the form of a missive to Piero Soderini, a new gonfaloniere in Florence, and was dated September 4, 1504. Soderini was a new man, “feeble and timorous, unequal to the moment,” and jealous of the Medici, with whom Vespucci had been associated.3
In his previous letters to Lorenzo, Amerigo had spoken of having made two voyages to the New World. To Soderini he is said to have spoken of four. The new letter was soon published as Quattuor Americi Vesputi navigationes (Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci)—that is, in 1497–98, 1499, 1501, and 1503—of which the first and last journeys were myths. The letter of September 1504 was full of inaccuracies, illogicalities, grammatical errors, and a few words that read like Italian hispanicisms. There were also some stories about defecation more suited to a popular English newspaper of the twenty-first century than to the Renaissance. The author was probably the Florentine hack journalist Giovanni Gicondoco. No one at the time realized that the letters were forgeries and that Vespucci had nothing to do with them.
The second of the forgeries had an extraordinary history. It was sent early in 1505 to, among others, René II, Duke of Lorraine, a Maecenas interested in geography. That Duke René was the nephew of the more famous “Bon Roi René,” a titular king of Sicily who had lived in France, at Angers and Chanzé. He, like his nephew, had been interested in geography, and, indeed, he had had maps of the world painted on the walls of his chateau. He was especially proud of his Latin translation of the book of the geographer Strabo recently completed by Guarino of Verona.4
Duke René in turn gave his copy of “Vespucci’s” last letter to a group of clever men known as the Gymnase Vosgien, in Saint-Dié, a small town in the Vosges in Alsace.5 They were a circle of intellectuals who met regularly in what the Spaniards would have called a peña. One of these men, Gauthier (Walter) Lud, acted as secretary to the Duke. He owned a printing press. Another member of the group, Martin Waldseemüller, had already decided to publish a new edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia (with a third friend, Mattheus Ringman, a professor of Latin). Waldseemüller, who had been working on these ideas for many years, wrote an introduction, Cosmographia Introductio, into which he inserted these Navigationes, having had them translated from Italian into Latin by a canon of Saint-Dié. In this he wrote:
Today these parts of the earth, Europe, Asia, and Africa, have been completely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci, as may be seen in the attached charts. And since Europe and Asia have received the names of women, I see no reason why we should not call this other place Amerige, that is the land of Amerigo, or America, after the wise man who discovered it.
Whether Asia and Europe are called after women is doubtful. “Asia” has been said to stand for the land of the “rising sun” or “land of light,” but it more likely derives from “Assiuva,” the Hittite word for northwest Asia Minor; while “Europa” indicates not only the beautiful daughter of Agenor, King of Tyre, with whom Zeus fell in love, but also, in the Greek mind, central Greece, then the Greek mainland, and, finally, the landmass behind it. “Africa,” on the other hand, was apparently a derivation of a Phoenician or Carthaginian place-name, and the Roman province had that name.
But Waldseemüller did consider that all these continents derived from the names of women and that was what caused him to choose a man’s name for the New World. His new Cosmographia was accompanied by a planisphere made by himself, alongside which there was an engraving of Ptolemy facing east and of Vespucci facing west: “We have proposed in this little book to write a kind of introduction … which we have depicted both on a globe and on a chart, very succinctly, of course, on the globe, where space was wanting, but more fully in the map of the world.” On this map, the new hemisphere across the Ocean Sea was named “America” for the first time.
This new edition of Ptolemy’s geography was published by Gauthier Lud on April 25, 1507. The woodcuts for the map were made fifty miles away at Strasbourg and printed in Saint-Dié.6 These later much influenced other mapmakers, including Mercator in the 1540s.7
Waldseemüller had no intention of diminishing the achievement of Columbus. He said as much in his foreword to Ptolemy. On his large map, indeed, he wrote in the Caribbean section: “These islands were discovered by Columbus, an admiral of Genoa, at the command of the King of Spain.” On the section dealing with South America, he wrote: “Here is a land discovered by Columbus, a captain of the King of Castile, and by Americus Vespucius, both men of great ability, which, though a great part of it lies beneath the path of the year and of the sun and the tropics, nevertheless extends about nineteen degrees beyond the Tropic of Capricorn toward the Antarctic pole.”
There were some astonishing elements in the map: an inset presented much of the northern part of what we now know as the Americas as well as the south. South America is well drawn. The two, North and South America, are connected, though on the larger map, not the inset, where they are separated by a hypothetical strait roughly where the Panama Canal now lies. Even more interesting, both the inset and the map present a large ocean between Asia and the New World—one even bigger than the Atlantic. It was an outstanding achievement to guess thus in 1507 when the Pacific had not even been seen by any European, much less crossed.8
Peter Martyr would soon write of South America that “this continent extends into the sea exactly like Italy, but it is dissimilar, in that it is not the shape of a human leg. Moreover, why should we compare a pigmy with a giant? That part of the continent beginning at this eastern point lying toward Atlas that the Spaniards have explored is at least eight times larger than Italy; and its western coast has not yet been discovered.”9
Frederick Pohl, the best biographer of Vespucci, points out that the word “America” is so euphonious and so happily parallel with the words “Asia” and “Africa” that the idea of using the word became immediately appealing.10 In 1509, it appeared on a globe, and others such followed, also carrying the magic name.
What an irony it is that the letter The Four Voyages, of which Duke René was so proud and which so influenced the sages of Saint-Dié, should have been a forgery! Vespucci’s first alleged voyage in 1497 never occurred, and Columbus did discover the continent of South America on his third voyage in 1498. Waldseemüller seems to have realized the truth, and another edition of Ptolemy, edited by him in 1513, gave more credit to Columbus. All the same, the cartographer Mercator, in his first world map, the heart-shaped Orbis Imago of 1538, applied the Christian name of Amerigo to the northern continent, North America, as well.11
That The Four Voyages was fraudulent was not hinted at until 1879, and it was not till 1926 that Professor Alberto Magnaghi of Milan, in a study of Vespucci, showed that both it and the Mundus Novus were forgeries.12
Vespucci deserved his legacy, “America.” In September 1503, after he had returned from his journey down the coast of Brazil in the King of Portugal’s service, he declared that he had been to a new world13—which he would christen Novus Orbis, “as the ancients had no knowledge of it.”14 He added that he wanted one day to go back to that world, in order to reach the East through the south by using the austral winds.15 But he never did so.
The board of royal advisers—Vespucci, Juan de la Cosa, Vicente Yáñez de Pinzón, and Juan Díaz de Solís—that met in Burgos in 1505 de
cided, first, to create in the Casa de Contratación a position of chief pilot (piloto mayor), a supreme geographer and cartographer who would chart the expeditions to the New World.
That appointment would, in the first instance, be held by Vespucci, who would be paid 75,000 maravedís a year, not a bad sum at that time though Governor Ovando was receiving 360,000 (Ovando had far more responsibilities, of course). The King hoped that Vespucci would train and impart his remarkable knowledge to all Spanish pilots and try to convince them to use his astronomical methods of establishing longitude at sea rather than relying on their old custom of dead reckoning.16 All masters of ships, before obtaining advances of money for voyages to the Indies, were to present themselves to Vespucci at the Casa de Contratación with details about the capacity of their vessels so that officials could determine their value and the amount that could be safely secured on them.17
On August 8, the King issued a patent that defined Vespucci’s duties and gave him the power to compel all pilots to submit to him. The words were strong:
No one shall presume to pilot [our] ships or receive pay as a pilot, nor may any master receive them on board, until they have first been examined by you, Amerigo Vespucci, our chief pilot, and have been given a certificate of examination and approval by you. We order that those who obtain the said certificates shall be accepted and received as skilled pilots by whomsoever is shown them, for it is our pleasure that you shall be the examiner of all pilots. In order that those who are ignorant may learn more easily, we order that you are to teach them, in your house in Seville, everything that they need to know, you receiving payment for your work.…
