Amerigo Vespucci

• 1. Introduction

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  Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence on the 9th of March 1454, and two continents bear his name. That fact alone is extraordinary. What makes it stranger still is that Vespucci may not have written the letters that put his name on the map. He may not have made all the voyages those letters describe. And he almost certainly died without knowing the world had named the Americas after him.

  He was a Florentine businessman, a chandler who supplied ships with ropes and provisions, a man who spent his middle years in Seville sorting out other people's debts. He came to exploration late and left behind a paper trail so tangled that historians still argue today about what he actually did. Was he a genius of navigation who grasped the shape of the New World before anyone else? Was he a fraud who backdated his accomplishments to upstage Columbus? Or was he simply a literate sailor whose name was borrowed by ambitious printers hungry for a bestseller?

  Those questions have never been fully settled. What follows is the story of how a Florentine merchant's son ended up giving his first name to half the globe.

• 2. A Florentine Education

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  Nastagio Vespucci, Amerigo's father, worked as a notary for the Money-Changers Guild in Florence. The family lived in the District of Santa Lucia d'Ognissanti, in a neighborhood dense with Vespucci relatives who had been funding local institutions for generations. An earlier ancestor, Simone di Piero Vespucci, founded the nearby Hospital of San Giovanni di Dio back in 1380.

  Amerigo's grandfather had served a total of 36 years as chancellor of the Florentine government, the body known as the Signoria. Political connections mattered enormously in Renaissance Florence, and the Vespuccis had cultivated the most important one available: a close relationship with Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of the city.

  Amerigo's two older brothers, Antonio and Girolamo, went off to the University of Pisa. Amerigo stayed home. Instead of a university education, he was tutored by his uncle Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, a Dominican friar at the monastery of San Marco who was regarded as one of the foremost humanist scholars in Florence at the time. That private education covered literature, philosophy, rhetoric, Latin, geography, and astronomy. His later writings showed a working familiarity with the ancient Greek cosmographers Ptolemy and Strabo, as well as the Florentine astronomer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli. The friar's library, it turned out, was better preparation for ocean exploration than Pisa might have been.

• 3. The Road to Seville

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  In 1478, a different uncle, Guido Antonio Vespucci, led a Florentine diplomatic mission to Paris and brought Amerigo along, probably as an attache or private secretary. The party stopped in Bologna, Milan, and Lyon before reaching the French capital to seek King Louis XI's support against Naples. Louis XI was noncommittal. The mission returned to Florence in 1481 with little to show for itself.

  After his father died in 1482, Amerigo went to work for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, the head of a junior branch of the family. Despite Amerigo being twelve years older, the two had been schoolmates under Giorgio Antonio Vespucci. Amerigo started as a household manager and steadily took on more responsibility. At some point during these years he bought an expensive map made by the master cartographer Gabriel de Vallseca, which suggests where his real interests lay.

  By 1492, Vespucci had moved to Seville for good. He had been sent there earlier to investigate a problem with the Medici business agent, and the resulting change brought him into the orbit of the Florentine merchant Gianotto Berardi. Berardi was deeply involved in outfitting Christopher Columbus's voyages, and he had also invested half a million maravedis in Columbus's first crossing. When Berardi died unexpectedly in December 1495 before fulfilling a crown contract to send twelve resupply ships to Hispaniola, it fell to Vespucci, the executor of his will, to collect the debts and settle the obligations. He was left personally owing 140,000 maravedis. Sometime during his years in Seville, he married a Spanish woman named Maria Cerezo. His will later described her as the daughter of the celebrated military leader Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba. She held power of attorney for Vespucci when he traveled.

• 4. The Voyages in Dispute

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  Starting in the late 1490s, Vespucci joined at least two documented expeditions to the New World. A third and fourth are claimed in letters attributed to him, but those claims are deeply contested.

  The 1499-1500 voyage is among the better-documented ones. Vespucci joined a fleet licensed by Spain and led by Alonso de Ojeda as fleet commander and Juan de la Cosa as chief navigator. Vespucci and his backers financed two of the four ships. The vessels left Spain on the 18th of May 1499, stopped in the Canary Islands, and eventually reached South America near present-day Suriname or French Guiana. After the fleet divided, the two ships carrying Vespucci headed south along a coast he assumed was the edge of Asia. He hoped to round a cape described by the geographer Ptolemy and reach the Indian Ocean. Along the way they passed two enormous rivers, later identified as the Amazon and the Para, whose freshwater pushed 25 miles out to sea. A strong adverse current eventually stopped their southward progress. On the return leg they made a brief slave raid in the Bahamas, capturing 232 Lucayans, before sailing home.

  The 1501-1502 voyage, under the Portuguese flag, is the one where Vespucci began developing his most consequential idea. King Manuel I of Portugal had sent Coelho's fleet of three ships to investigate a landmass that Pedro Alvares Cabral had stumbled upon the previous year. Vespucci served as pilot under Gonçalo Coelho. On the 17th of August 1501 they reached Brazil at roughly 6 degrees south latitude. Sailing south, they found a bay on the 1st of January 1502 and named it Rio de Janeiro after the date of their arrival. On the 13th of February 1502 they turned for home. It was during or after this expedition that Vespucci concluded that Brazil was not an extension of Asia but part of an entirely separate landmass unknown to Europeans. He called it the "New World," or in Latin, Mundus Novus.

  The alleged first voyage, supposedly departing Spain on the 10th of May 1497, appears in a letter addressed to the Florentine official Piero Soderini and dated 1504. The account describes a course starting near Honduras and proceeding northwest for 870 leagues, roughly 3,190 miles, a route that would geometrically have crossed Mexico and reached the Pacific Ocean. Bartolome de las Casas, writing at the time, suspected Vespucci had folded observations from a later voyage into a fictional earlier one in order to claim he reached the mainland before Columbus. Scholar Alberto Magnaghi argued the letter was not written by Vespucci at all.

• 5. Letters That Moved the World

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  Two publications appeared under Vespucci's name in 1503 and 1505, and both spread across Europe with extraordinary speed. Mundus Novus, addressed to his old schoolmate Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici and describing the 1501-1502 Brazil voyage, appeared first in Latin. Within a year of publication, twelve editions had been printed, including translations into Italian, French, German, Dutch, and other languages. By 1550, at least 50 editions had circulated.

  The Letter to Soderini, published in Florence around 1505, was more sensational in tone. It was the only text to assert that Vespucci made four complete voyages of exploration. Its authorship and accuracy have been questioned by modern historians far more sharply than those of Mundus Novus. Magnaghi, after his exhaustive review published in 1924, concluded that both printed letters were not written by Vespucci in the form that circulated publicly. He proposed instead that unscrupulous Florentine publishers had cobbled together the Soderini letter from several sources, some from genuine Vespucci manuscripts, some from elsewhere.

  The manuscript letters that survived in unpublished form are a different matter. Three complete handwritten letters were uncovered by researchers more than 250 years after Vespucci's death. By 1924, Magnaghi had convincingly demonstrated their authenticity, and most historians now accept them as Vespucci's own work. The Letter from Seville, describing the 1499-1500 voyage, was first published in 1745 by Angelo Maria Bandini. The Letter from Cape Verde, written at the outset of the 1501-1502 voyage and first published in 1807 by Count Baldelli Boni, also recorded details about Cabral's return journey to India, gathered when the two fleets met by chance in a Cape Verde harbour. The Letter from Lisbon, picking up where the Cape Verde letter left off, was first published by Francesco Bartolozzi in 1789.

• 6. The Name on the Map

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  The Soderini letter reached a group of humanist scholars in Saint-Die, a small French town in the Duchy of Lorraine, who were studying geography under the direction of Walter Lud. Among them were Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller. In 1506 they obtained a French translation of the Soderini letter and a Portuguese maritime map showing newly discovered coastlines in the western Atlantic. They concluded that what they were looking at matched the "new world" and "antipodes" hypothesized by ancient writers.

  In April 1507, Ringmann and Waldseemüller published their Introduction to Cosmography alongside a world map. Ringmann wrote in the preface: "I see no reason why anyone could properly disapprove of a name derived from that of Amerigo, the discoverer, a man of sagacious genius. A suitable form would be Amerige, meaning Land of Amerigo, or America, since Europe and Asia have received women's names." A thousand copies of the world map were printed under the title Universal Geography According to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Contributions of Amerigo Vespucci and Others. It featured prominent portraits of Ptolemy and Vespucci. The name America appeared on a map for the first time.

  The Introduction went through four editions in its first year. The map was used in universities and admired by other cartographers. In 1538, Gerardus Mercator applied the name America to both the North and South continents on his influential map, locking the convention in place.

  The story has a quietly ironic coda. In 1513, Waldseemüller published a new map that labeled the New World as "Terra Incognita" and named Columbus as its discoverer. Most historians now believe Vespucci never saw the 1507 map that honored him and died without knowing the continents had been named after him. Many historians also believe he did not write the Soderini letter, the document that triggered the naming in the first place.

• 7. Piloto Mayor

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  By early 1505, Vespucci was back in Seville, and King Ferdinand summoned him in February to consult on matters of navigation. The king was particularly interested in whether a western passage to India might exist. Over the following months Vespucci received payments from the crown, and in April he was declared a citizen of Castile and Leon by royal proclamation.

  In March 1508, he was appointed chief pilot for the Casa de Contratacion, Spain's central trading house for its overseas possessions, with an annual salary of 50,000 maravedis plus 25,000 for expenses. In his new role he was responsible for certifying that ships' pilots were adequately trained and licensed before sailing to the New World. He was also charged with compiling the Padron Real, a master map built from reports that all pilots were required to submit after each voyage.

  Vespucci wrote his will in April 1511. He left the bulk of his modest estate, including five household slaves, to his wife Maria. His clothes, books, and navigational instruments went to his nephew Giovanni Vespucci. He asked to be buried in a Franciscan habit in his wife's family tomb. He died on the 22nd of February 1512.

  After his death, Maria was awarded an annual pension of 10,000 maravedis, deducted from the salary of whoever held the chief pilot post next. His nephew Giovanni was hired into the Casa de Contratacion, where he eventually spent his later years working as a spy for the Florentine state.

• 8. The Vespucci Question

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  Sebastian Cabot was among the first to publicly question Vespucci's accomplishments, raising doubts about the 1497 voyage as early as 1515. Bartolome de las Casas went further, calling Vespucci a liar who stole credit belonging to Columbus. By 1600, most Europeans regarded him as an impostor.

  The low point came in 1856 when Ralph Waldo Emerson called Vespucci a "thief" and "pickle dealer" from Seville who had managed to get "half the world baptized with his dishonest name." Alexander von Humboldt, writing in 1839 after careful analysis, had already rejected the 1497 voyage as impossible while accepting the two Portuguese expeditions. Humboldt also questioned whether Vespucci genuinely understood he had reached a continent new to Europeans, suggesting that both Vespucci and Columbus died believing they had touched the eastern edge of Asia.

  The rehabilitation began slowly. Brazilian historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen argued in 1857 that everything in the Soderini letter was accurate, and others followed. Alberto Magnaghi's 1924 study proposed the cleanest resolution available: the two printed letters were fabrications or heavy alterations; the three manuscript letters were genuine; and only the second and third voyages were real. Argentine historian Roberto Levellier disagreed and endorsed all four voyages. Frederick J. Pohl accepted the two-voyage thesis in 1944. German Arciniegas rejected it in 1955, declaring all four voyages truthful. Samuel Morison, writing in 1974, flatly rejected the first voyage but remained noncommittal on the printed letters. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, writing in 2007, called the authenticity question "inconclusive" and proposed that the first voyage was probably a garbled version of the second.

  What the source texts do reveal is a subtler point about the word "continent" itself. Vespucci's own Italian and Latin texts refer to the newly discovered lands as a "new world" or "new land," not a continent. The English translation by George Tyler Northrop introduced the noun continent where Vespucci had written something closer to "a new land... a continuous mainland." The debate over what Vespucci actually understood is partly a translation problem layered over an authorship problem, which is precisely why historians have called him the most enigmatic figure in early American history.