Amerigo Vespucci

Italian explorer

• Born: March 9, 1454
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: February 22, 1512
• Place of death: Seville, Spain

The first European credited with persuading his contemporaries that what Christopher Columbus had discovered was a New World, Vespucci revolutionized geographic thinking when he argued that the region now bearing his name (America) was a continent distinct from Asia.

Early Life

Amerigo Vespucci (ah-MEHR-ee-goh vay-SPEWT-chee) was the third son of a Florentine family of five children. His father, Stagio Vespucci, was a modestly prosperous notary and a member of a respected and learned clan that cultivated good relations with Florence’s intellectual and artistic elite. The fortunes of the family improved during Amerigo’s lifetime, and his father would twice occupy positions of fiscal responsibility in the Florentine government.

Unlike his older brothers, who attended the University of Pisa, Amerigo received his education at home under the tutelage of a paternal uncle, Giorgio Antonio, a Dominican friar. The youth became proficient in Latin and developed interests in mathematics and geography, interests he was able to indulge in his tutor’s extensive library. In his uncle’s circle, Amerigo also became acquainted with the theories of Paolo Toscanelli dal Pozzo, a Florentine physician and cosmographer who first suggested the possibility of a westward voyage as an alternative route to the Orient, an idea that Christopher Columbus and others eventually borrowed.

The study of geography was considered useful for anyone interested in a career in commerce, the profession chosen for Amerigo by his parents. Travel was also considered suitable training for businessmen, and Amerigo accepted the first opportunity when another uncle, Guido Antonio Vespucci, a lawyer, invited the twenty-four-year-old to Paris. The elder Vespucci had been appointed Florentine ambassador to the court of Louis XI in 1478 and had asked his young relative to join him as his private secretary.

In 1482, two years after Amerigo’s return to Florence from France, his father died, making Amerigo responsible for the support of the family. The following year, Amerigo became manager of the household of one of the branches of the ruling Medici family, and he performed his task loyally for the next sixteen years. In this capacity, he traveled to Spain at least once to look after the financial interests of the Medicis. He was in Spain again toward the end of 1491 and settled permanently in the city of Seville, where he established financial relations with the city’s active Italian merchant community. He would eventually marry María Cerezo, a native of Seville. The couple had no children.

At the close of the fifteenth century, the port city of Seville was the hub of commercial activity and the center of overseas travel and exploration. The Portuguese had taken the lead in the search for a new route to India by circumnavigating Africa. Confirmation of the accuracy of their vision came with news that Bartolomeu Dias’s expedition had reached the Cape of Good Hope (the southernmost tip of Africa) in 1488. The Spanish lagged behind their Portuguese neighbors until Columbus’s triumphant return from his first voyage. The Crown had paid Columbus’s expenses, and he was expected to search for yet another alternate route to the East. Following the theories of Toscanelli, Columbus sailed in 1492 and returned to Spain early the following year.

Columbus’s initial optimistic reports that he had found a new route to Asia ensured greater interest and opportunities for investment on the part of all who knew of his trip, and Vespucci would soon be involved in several of the many maritime enterprises that mushroomed in Seville in the wake of Columbus’s success. Vespucci, as a subaltern of the Italian merchant Giannetto Berardi, assisted Columbus in financing and outfitting a second voyage of discovery, which sailed in 1493. Berardi died before the provisioning of the fleet was complete, and Vespucci assumed the task. It is highly likely that Vespucci and Columbus had many opportunities to meet during this period and that the Florentine’s early interest in geography and cosmography was revived as a result of these contacts. The lure of the sea and the prospects of discovery would soon prove irresistible. By 1499, Vespucci had decided to change professions from businessman to explorer.

Life’s Work

Much controversy surrounds certain facts about Vespucci’s life between the years 1497 and 1499 the period immediately prior to his first generally acknowledged ocean voyage especially because some of his biographers assert that he, not Columbus, was the first European to discover the American mainland along the coast of northern South America. In order for this assertion to be valid, Vespucci would have had to undertake this voyage before Columbus’s third during which Columbus sailed along the coast of Venezuela that is, before June, 1498.

Vespucci was an inveterate letter writer. The most compelling evidence that he might have gone on this trip appears in a document of dubious authenticity attributed to Vespucci himself, the Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nouvamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (c. 1505; The First Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci , 1885). This long letter is addressed to the head of the Florentine republic, the gonfalonier Piero Soderini. In this document, the author purports to have made four voyages overseas, the first of which, around 1497, took him along the Caribbean coast of the American mainland that is, to Venezuela, Central America, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the Gulf of Mexico well in advance of Columbus. Since there is little independent evidence to corroborate information about this voyage, many scholars dismiss this episode as a fiction propagated by the letter, which could have been a forgery published by an overzealous and unscrupulous printer eager to cash in on a reading public thirsty for news of and reports from the New World. The fourth voyage described in the letter is also believed to be apocryphal.

What is universally accepted is that Vespucci sailed for the New World as a member of a three-ship expedition under the command of the Spaniard Alonso de Ojeda in the spring of 1499. Two of the ships had been outfitted by Vespucci, at his own expense, in the hope of reaching India. Vespucci’s expectations were founded on a set of maps drawn from the calculations of Ptolemy, the Egyptian mathematician and astronomer of the second century, whose work Geōgraphikē hyphēgēsis (Geography, 1932) was the foremost authority to fifteenth century Europeans on matters related to the size and shape of the world.

Ptolemy had concluded that the world was made up of three continents: Europe, Africa, and Asia. When Vespucci set out on his voyage in 1499, he expected to reach the Cape of Cattigara, the southernmost point of Asia on Ptolemy’s map. Instead, his expedition reached the northern coast of Brazil and the mouth of the Amazon River. From there, Vespucci’s ship proceeded southward to the equatorial zone, after which it turned northward to the Caribbean, navigating along the northeastern coast of South America. Seeing houses on stilts that reminded the crew of Venice, they named the area Venezuela, meaning little Venice. The entire expedition returned to Spain, with a cargo of pearls and slaves and not the hoped-for Asian spices.

Back in Seville, Vespucci planned a second expedition that would take him farther south along the Brazilian coastal route, but his license to travel was suddenly revoked, on the grounds that he was a foreigner, when the Spanish crown, in competition with the Portuguese, began to treat geographical knowledge as secrets of state. When the ships that made up the expedition sailed in August, 1500, they carried only Spaniards. A Portuguese explorer, Pedro Álvares Cabral , had already claimed Brazil for the Portuguese crown in 1500 and, perhaps because of this fact, Vespucci’s knowledge of its northern coast might have been of interest to Portugal. He was summoned to appear before King Manuel I. The monarch commissioned the Florentine to undertake a new voyage of discovery along the coast of Brazil, following Cabral’s and Vespucci’s own original intentions. Vespucci sailed from Lisbon in the spring of 1501.

This second independently verifiable voyage of Vespucci followed the coast of Brazil, crossed the equator, and proceeded south to Patagonia. Experiences during this last stage convinced Vespucci that Ptolemy’s calculations had been mistaken, that the Cape of Cattigara and Asia were not where they were expected to be, and that the landmass before his eyes was more likely a new continent, separate and distinct from Asia. On his return to Lisbon, Vespucci, along with geographers and mapmakers, began to redraw and redesign Ptolemy’s world to accommodate this new insight. The Atlantic coast of this region began to be detailed in maps that circulated throughout Europe, the first of which appeared in 1502.

Vespucci’s employment by the Portuguese did not last long. He returned to Seville in 1502, disappointed that his plans for the exploitation of the new lands were not accepted by Manuel. In Spain, Vespucci’s efforts and considerable geographical and navigational knowledge were finally recognized, and in 1505, he was granted citizenship by King Ferdinand II, who appointed him pilot major of the country’s board of trade, the Casa de Contratación de las Indias. Vespucci held this position until his death in 1512.

Vespucci is believed to have been short of stature, with an aquiline nose, brown eyes, and wavy hair. This description comes from a family portrait painted by the Florentine muralist Ghirlandajo. Vespucci has also been described as deceitful, self-promoting, and cunning. His reputation suffered after the publication of two letters attributed to him, The First Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, mentioned earlier, and Mundus novus (c. 1503; English translation, 1916), an account of Vespucci’s 1501 expedition addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, his Florentine employer. In this second letter, the author argues that the lands he had earlier visited (the Atlantic coast of South America) could only be part of a new world.

The ideas contained in the disputed letters, published in many editions and languages shortly after their initial printing, inspired a German mapmaker, Martin Waldseemüller, at Saint-Dié in Lorraine, to draw a new map to accompany narrative descriptions of this new world. The map, which was published in 1507, more closely resembles the geography of the South American continent than earlier efforts, separates South America from Asia, and assigns to the new land the name America in honor of its presumed discoverer Americus (Amerigo). The feminine version of Amerigo was selected to be consistent with the feminine names of the other continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This is the first known example of the use of America as the name of the new continent. The word was quickly accepted by northern Europeans as the rightful name for South America, but it would take some fifty years before southern Europe adopted the name and applied it to the entire American landmass, north and south.

Vespucci’s complicity in this matter has never been fully established; some believe that he contributed to his own mythology by making himself the center of attention in all his correspondence, never mentioning others in his circle under whose direction he might have worked. He is accused of taking credit for the deeds of his collaborators. Defenders of Columbus, the bulk of Vespucci’s critics, argue that the new continent should have been named for Columbus rather than for Vespucci the impostor. Columbus, however, was never quite convinced that the lands he had reached were not in Asia and did not live long enough to experience the historical slight in favor of Vespucci.

Significance

Vespucci, in spite of his being seriously criticized by a number of eminent and revered figures, deserves much of the credit for revolutionizing geographic thinking in Europe. His travels, especially his vain search for Asia following a Ptolemaic map, convinced him that the accepted authority on things geographical was mistaken. To challenge Ptolemy and a scientific tradition of such long standing in sixteenth century Europe was an act of great intellectual and moral courage.

While Europeans were slow in accepting the full implications of Vespucci’s discoveries, his insights nevertheless received much immediate publicity. Vespucci’s ideas captivated the imagination of cartographers and publishers, and a steady stream of historical literature filled the minds of Europe’s growing reading public. These accounts fired readers’ imaginations. Vespucci’s conclusions stimulated the growing community of cartographers, navigators, and geographers. He described his experiences in detail, kept careful records of astronomical, navigational, and geographical observations, and made it possible for his contemporaries to accept the idea of America long before additional eyewitness evidence would confirm the wisdom of his insights.

Bibliography

Arciniegas, Germán. Why America? Five Hundred Years of a Name: The Life and Times of Amerigo Vespucci. Translated by Harriet de Onís. 2d ed. Bogotá, Colombia: Villegas Editores, 2002. New edition of the classic, if perhaps overly admiring, biography. Argues vehemently in favor of the authenticity of Vespucci’s four voyages. The author dismisses some of the criticism of Vespucci as nationalistic propaganda.

Branch, Michael P., ed. Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Provides an excerpt from Vespucci’s descriptions of America, along with commentary placing this text as one of the earliest examples of the genre of American nature writing. Looks at the way Vespucci’s understanding of nature in the New World compares to later authors. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Masini, Giancarlo, with Iacopo Gori. How Florence Invented America: Vespucci, Verrazzano, and Mazzei and Their Contribution to the Conception of the New World. New York: Marsilio, 1998. Argues that Vespucci and his fellow Florentines not only helped convince people that the continents of America existed but also contributed to the ideals of democratic republicanism that eventually shaped the government of the United States.

Parry, J. H. The Discovery of South America. New York: Taplinger, 1979. An informative and panoramic account of European expansion in the Americas by one of North America’s most respected historians. This work is filled with replicas of contemporary maps and charts and is a serious and objective treatment of the period. Parry disputes the authenticity of The First Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci but credits Vespucci with having contributed to Europe’s knowledge of geography and navigation.

Pohl, Frederick J. Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major. 2d ed. New York: Octagon Books, 1966. The author devotes much attention to Vespucci’s mature years, the period of his life that coincides with his voyages overseas. Pohl believes that Vespucci was a most deserving individual and that his fame was legitimately earned. Contains a complete English version of two of Vespucci’s letters and two informative appendices.

Vespucci, Amerigo. Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America. Edited by Luciano Formisano. Translated by David Jacobson. New York: Marsilio, 1992. Collects the letters of Vespucci recounting his travels and discoveries in the New World. Several appendices contain important historical documents, such as Vespucci’s letter of naturalization, a letter about Vespucci written by Christopher Columbus to his son, and excerpts from Bartolomé de Las Casas’s History of the Indies. Includes eight pages of plates, illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index.

Vigneras, Louis-André. The Discovery of South America and the Andalusian Voyages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. A carefully constructed survey of the separate expeditions from Spain to the Americas beginning with Columbus’s first voyage in 1492. A separate appendix is devoted to Vespucci’s Portuguese voyage. The author’s treatment of Vespucci echoes the consensus of contemporary scholarship about him by doubting the authenticity of two of the four voyages.

Zweig, Stefan. Amerigo: A Comedy of Errors in History. Translated by Andrew St. James. New York: Viking Press, 1942. An account by the popular Austrian writer who at one point resided in Brazil. Zweig believes that the Americas were so named because of an error, and he argues that Vespucci’s letters are filled with serious factual mistakes and coincidences. For Zweig, Vespucci’s great fame rests on a false foundation.