Amerigo Vespucci

I

Introduction

Amerigo Vespucci (Latin, Americus Vespucius) (1454-1512), Italian navigator, after whom the continents of America are named. He was born on March 9, 1454 (or possibly 1451) in Florence, and came from a family of wealthy merchants. His education by his uncle, a Dominican scholar, included instruction in astronomy and navigation. In 1490 he was sent to Barcelona as trading agent for the Medici, and in 1495 he took over the business of another Italian, Giovanni Berardi, in Seville, furnishing supplies to ships voyaging to the Caribbean. Vespucci, drawing on his expertise in navigation, later set out for the New World himself. He left accounts, in letters to two Florentine patrons, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici (1501) and Piero Soderini (1504), of four voyages, though a book-length account titled Quattro Giornate (Four Voyages), which he mentions to Soderini, has never been found. These letters were published in his lifetime, but may include additions or embellishments by other, unknown writers.

Most scholars discredit many of the claims made in these letters. Vespucci’s description (in 1504) of the first voyage, supposedly made in 1497-1498, contains no names of other participants who could have corroborated it, and is very vague as to the route travelled, allowing commentators to speculate that he ranged along the east coast of the Americas from as far south as the equator to as far north as Chesapeake Bay. Most damaging for the account’s credibility, however, are the large number of descriptions of peoples encountered, and specific incidents that are straightforward repeats of passages from his account of the second voyage in his earlier letter to Lorenzo de Medici.

II

Vespucci’s Voyages

This “second” voyage (1499-1500, in reality probably Vespucci’s first across the Atlantic) was led by the Spanish soldier Alonso de Ojeda, and piloted by the Spanish navigator Juan de la Cosa (both veterans of the second voyage of the Italian-Spanish navigator Christopher Columbus in 1493), and is well attested from independent sources. Setting out in either two or three ships from Cádiz on May 18, 1499, they sailed south-west, reaching land 24 days out from the Canary Islands. They followed this coast as it trended south-east, passing the mouths of two rivers of such volume the water was still fresh some 80 km (50 mi) off shore; if these were two of the mouths of the Amazon, it would make this voyage the first by Europeans to have encountered the world’s biggest river, some six months before Vicente Yáñez Pinzón did so in January 1500. However, Vespucci does not mention the latitude of this discovery, only saying that the southernmost point they reached on this voyage was 6° south of the equator, a little beyond Cape São Roque.

From here Vespucci says they reversed course and coasted north-westwards to the northern mouth of the Orinoco River opposite what is now Trinidad, landing wherever they could. They allied with a tribe on the continental shore of Venezuela, who supplied them with large numbers of pearls, to attack the inhabitants of Margarita Island, whom Vespucci claimed were cannibals. They then coasted west and rounded the Paraguaná Peninsula to enter a large, shallow gulf, finding a waterside village built on stilts over the water. For this reason they named the region “Little Venice”—in Spanish, Venezuela. From here they sailed due north to repair their ships at Hispaniola before returning to Spain, where they arrived at Cádiz on June 8, 1500.

Shortly afterwards Vespucci was invited by King Emanuel of Portugal to pilot a voyage for that country. The fleet of three ships, probably commanded by Gaspar de Lemos (other names have been proposed), set out from Lisbon on May 13, 1501. From a port in Senegal they made a three-month crossing of the Atlantic, making landfall at about 5° South—the southernmost point Vespucci had reached on the previous voyage. Here they lost three men (Vespucci claims to a tribe of cannibals) who had gone ashore to trade.

Vespucci continued south, establishing friendly relations with tribes along the way. In January 1502 they reached the site of Rio de Janeiro, which they named after the month of their arrival, and continued along the coast until, he claims, they reached 32° South, about the latitude of today’s city of Rio Grande. Here they took on new provisions, and on February 15, 1502 sailed away from the continent to the south-east. Vespucci reports that on April 3 they had sailed 500 leagues (2,775 km) from land, and four days later they saw a rugged island at 52° South, a new record for the furthest south reached at sea. If the distance, direction, and latitude are correct, this land would probably have been South Georgia, which they would have been the first people to see. From there the cold forced them to head north-east towards Africa, and after taking on wood and water in Sierra Leone they returned to Lisbon on September 7, 1502.

Vespucci’s last known voyage, also for Portugal, set sail from Lisbon in a fleet of six ships commanded by Gonçalo Coelho and bound for Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula. However, none of the ships managed to leave the Atlantic. Sailing south-west from Sierra Leone, they reached a small island group now named Fernando de Noronha, off the coast of Brazil. Here Vespucci’s ship was separated from the others, and sailing towards the coast, they became the first Europeans to find the Bay of All Saints (Bahia de Todos os Santos), site of today’s city of Salvador. After two months they sailed on as far as 18° South, where they established a fort that 24 men were left to garrison when Vespucci’s ship returned to Lisbon, arriving on June 18, 1504. (The other ships eventually made their way back to Portugal via the African coast.)

Shortly afterwards Vespucci returned to Spanish service, and may have made two further voyages to the Caribbean with Juan de la Cosa, in 1505 and 1507, though neither are firmly attested to. In 1508, King Ferdinand V gave him the title of pilot-major, responsible for the training of all Spanish pilots in navigation techniques; he remained in this post until his death on February 22, 1512.

III

The Naming of America

Vespucci seems to have been respected for his skills as pilot and navigator, but his main historical significance rests on his first voyage for Portugal. Before this voyage, the possibility remained open that the extended coastline of northern South America was a peninsula of Asia. But Asia was known (from the homeward voyage of Marco Polo in 1292) not to extend south of the equator, so by following the continental coastline as far as 32° South, Vespucci proved that it must be a different continent altogether, or, as he was the first to term it, a Mundus Novus (New World).

It was for this breakthrough that the German geographer and cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who published Vespucci's letter to Soderini in 1507, suggested that the new land be named “America” after its discoverer (Vespucci’s written account meant that his name, rather than the expedition commander’s, became associated with the discovery). As the extent of South America was revealed by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and others, the name gradually came to be applied to the whole continent, and was then extended to apply to the northern continent as well. The world map published by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1538 was the first major publication to use the name “America” to indicate the entire western hemisphere.