Americo vespucio
Amerigo Vespucci (in Italian, Amerigo Vespucci [/ameˈriɡo vesˈputtʃi/]) (Florence, March 9, 1454 – Seville, February 22, 1512) was an Italian merchant, explorer and cosmographer, naturalized Castilian in 1505, who participated in at least two exploration trips to the New World, a continent that today is called America in his honor. He held important positions in the House of Seville, of which he was appointed chief pilot in 1508; but his universal fame is due to two works published under his name between 1503 and 1505: the Mundus Novus and the Letter to Soderini, which give him a leading role in the Discovery of America and its identification as a new continent. For this reason the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in his map Universalis Cosmographia of 1507 coined the name "America" in his honor as a designation for the New World. The often fanciful and contradictory account of his voyages have established him as one of the most controversial figures of the Age of Discovery.
Biography
Florence
He was the third son of Nastagio Vespucci, a Florentine notary specializing in foreign exchange, and Lisa di Giovanni Mini. They named him after their grandfather, who died in 1468. The eldest of the brothers, Antonio, He studied law and the second, Girolamo, became a priest. Américo also had a younger brother, Bernardo, and several others who died shortly after birth. His paternal uncle was the enlightened Dominican friar Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, a friend of Lorenzo de' Medici "the Magnificent", of the occultist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the geographer Toscanelli; and was in charge of the young man's education.
Giorgio had donated to the city in 1450 his important collection of books and around the same time had opened a school for the sons of Florentine aristocrats in his convent of San Marco. There he trained Américo and other young men in the teachings of Aristotle, Ptolemy and Strabo on astronomy, cosmography and geography; in reading the classics and particularly in mastering the learned language, Latin (in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence there is a small codex of his authorship, entitled Dettati da mettere in latino, written in that language). Amerigo acquired a predilection for Virgil, Dante, and Petrarch, and probably read Marco Polo's travel books.He left a written record of his skepticism toward Christian beliefs:
...Finally, I have in little esteem the things of heaven and I am close even to denying them.
At the beginning of the 1470s, the Vespucci clan commissioned the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, then still little known, a family portrait to decorate a chapel in the church of Ognissanti. In the 16th century Giorgio Vasari claimed that one of those portrayed was Américo but there is no objective evidence of this.
In 1478 the reaction of the Medici to the failed Pazzi conspiracy precipitated Florence's confrontation with Pope Sixtus IV and caused the war with Naples. Lorenzo the Magnificent decided to send an ambassador to the court of Louis XI in Paris so that the French monarch declared war on Naples.He chose Guidantonio Vespucci, another of the illustrious members of the Vespucci clan. Américo, who was 24 years old at the time, accompanied his relative in an unknown role, perhaps as a servant or personal secretary. The mission was a failure because Louis XI was still digesting the annexation of the Duchy of Burgundy and refused to go to war in Italy. Uncle and nephew were called back to Florence in 1480 after the signing of peace with Naples and the normalization of relations with the Papacy.
The Vespucci fortunes had been in slow decline for decades. His father wanted Amerigo to dedicate himself exclusively to the clan's businesses. Medici and his brother Giovanni. While he was in Florence, his main occupation was as a commission agent in the purchase and sale of precious stones on behalf of third parties.
Americo's father died in April 1482, a time when Florence began to be convulsed by the moral denunciation of the friar Girolamo Savonarola. His two brothers, Girolamo and Bernardo, were vagabond and bohemian in character, and had found other ways far from the city.
In Florencia Americo had a daughter with a woman without being married. The names of both are unknown and the fact is only known from a letter received from Spain on an uncertain date:
Tell me how your daughter and mother are, and a certain woman named Francesca. All a thousand memories. I'd like to know if the Lisandra is okay. Not because I love her, but to know if she's alive or dead. She has a poor idea of me, and I'm worse off her. Many memories to all in Lorenzo's house, and especially to the master Giacomo, the shoemaker.
Seville
In 1489 Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco di Medici fired his commercial agent in Seville and commissioned Américo to find a replacement for the position. Américo proposed Juanoto Berardi, a Florentine businessman established in Seville since 1485, and Lorenzo hired him. The Iberian Peninsula was at this time a prosperous commercial center, and Seville the most important economic center of the crown of Castile. The kings of Castile and Aragon, Ferdinand and Isabella, were at that time completing the conquest of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada.
Américo moved to Seville in late 1491 or early 1492, in principle still under the orders of Pierfrancesco but in practice becoming an agent of Juanoto Berardi, who was engaged in the slave trade and armed and provisioning of ships, an activity that had grown considerably throughout the XV century after the so-called Mine was located in Guinea de Oro. Berardi participated as an investor and as a subcontractor in the preparations for the first voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World and through him Vespucci and Columbus established a friendship. The business, however, turned out to be ruinous for Berardi, who died in December 1495. Américo was one of the executors of his will, in which he claimed 180,000 maravedíes from Columbus. Between 1495 and 1497 he was officially replaced as agent of Lorenzo de Pierfrancesco by Piero Rondinelli. In January 1496, Américo was at Sanlúcar de Barrameda provisioning a fleet of four caravels chartered by the late Berardi to bring supplies to Hispaniola. A few days after leaving Sanlúcar, a storm surprised the ships and ran them aground on the Cadiz coast. Alice Gould hypothesized that Vespucci might have embarked himself on the flagship of this ill-fated flotilla, but more recent scholarship makes it more likely that he stayed ashore to prepare other fleets to which he had committed.
In the middle of 1496 Columbus returned from his second voyage, he left in 1498 on his third voyage to the Indies and finally in 1499 he was arrested in Hispaniola and taken in chains before the kings, who definitively put an end to the Colombian monopoly of the sailings to the Indies. From then on they authorized numerous trips to explore and get riches from the new lands. Américo embarked on the first of them, the one captained by Alonso de Ojeda to the current coast of Venezuela in 1499. He returned sick but with 14 pearls, the sale of which brought him more than 1000 ducats.
Some texts attributed to Vespucci state that he would have participated in a previous expedition, between 1497 and 1498-99. The consensus among current historians is that such a trip never existed.
In Portugal
In the late 1500s or early 1501s Vespucci moved to Lisbon, where he embarked on a Portuguese expedition. The reason why he left Castile has been the subject of controversy among historians. Vespucci's version is that he received an invitation from the Portuguese king. It has been speculated that it could be an espionage maneuver arranged with the Castilian crown. On the other hand, in 1499 a wave of xenophobia had been unleashed in Castile that made that the kings prohibited foreigners from embarking for the Indies.
This Portuguese expedition to the New World is well documented and researchers do not doubt that it took place, although its purpose is not entirely clear: perhaps to reconnoiter the land discovered by Cabral in 1500. Vespucci's role in it seems to have It was mainly commercial, although he would later write that he had participated out of mere curiosity, "to see the world". In any case, the ships returned to Lisbon with zero economic results.
The Letter to Soderini tells of another voyage by Vespucci on Portuguese ships, in 1503-1504, which bears some resemblance to an expedition led by Gonçalo Coelho. Opinions are divided as to whether Vespucci actually took part in that trip.
Back in Spain
There is evidence of Vespucci's presence in Seville in 1502 and again in February 1505, when a letter from Christopher Columbus to his son Diego praised the Florentine and said he had him living in his house.
Vespucio married a woman named María Cerezo most likely that same year. She was the daughter, perhaps out of wedlock, of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. It is believed that the relationship between the two dates back to the navigator's first period in Seville. On the other hand, in 1504 and 1505 two works were published in Paris and Florence, usually called Mundus Novus and Lettera or Letter to Soderini, which recount supposed voyages carried out by Vespucci and which would eventually give him universal fame.
By this time, Queen Isabel had died and her husband Fernando, now only King of Aragon, had assumed the regency of Castile in the name of his daughter and heiress of both, Juana, later called "la Loca". Vespucci went on to work in the service of the crown and was declared a native of the "kingdoms of Castile and León" in 1505:
Doña Juana, by the grace of God (...) For doing good and mercy to you, Amerigo Vezpuche, a Florentine, obeying your fidelity and some of your good services which you have done to me, and I hope you will do me from here onwards, by the present I make natural destos my kingdoms of Castile and Leon, and that you may have and there are any public offices Real and councils, that you may be given to me
King Ferdinand entrusted Vicente Yáñez Pinzón with an expedition to find the western passage to the Especiería islands, aboard a flotilla whose ships would be built in Vizcaya. Vespucci was in charge of providing the supplies for the fleet and was appointed captain of one of the ships. However, although all his preparations were carried out, this trip never took place, since the rivalry between Ferdinand and the new Castilian king, Felipe el Hermoso, introduced a series of of delays and uncertainties in the project that ended up being cancelled.
By 1506 Vespucci had become an indispensable figure in the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, organizing and supplying expeditions to the Indies. At the end of 1507 and beginning of 1508 he was ordered to transport a cargo of gold to the court and was summoned by the king to participate in a meeting of cosmographers and navigators together with Yáñez Pinzón, Juan de la Cosa and Juan Díaz de Solís. In February 1508 this meeting took place, called Junta de Burgos, chaired by King Ferdinand, who had already recovered the government of Castile after the death of his son-in-law Felipe. There it was decided to resume the exploration plans of the New World, especially those concerning the South Pass, which had lost strength during the Habsburg interregnum. The king commissioned Yáñez Pinzón and Díaz de Solís to search for this road to La Especiería. Vespucci was given a new role that would keep him on solid ground: on March 22, King Ferdinand named him "piloto mayor de Castilla", dependent on the House of Hiring. His functions would be to teach navigation skills (especially the handling of the quadrant and the astrolabe), cosmography and piloting at the new naval school in the city; to track and rate the progress of trainees; to apply sanctions for violation of the rules; to inspect navigation instruments and investigate problems related to the activity. He was also in charge of cartographic and hydrographic records, with a central task being the preparation of the Padrón Real, the map where all new discoveries would appear.
The king appointed him pilot mayor to introduce Spanish pilots to the use of astronomical methods of navigation, replacing their old dead reckoning practices, and to examine them, assuring their competence. Vespucci would later complain that his students were reluctant to learn his lessons. The historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto opines that the astronomical techniques proposed by the Florentine were "essentially useless"; due to the technical insufficiency of the instruments of the time and that the Andalusian pilots were right to feel humiliated at having to be examined by someone with so little practical navigation experience. Vespucci never completed the Royal Register and it is not preserved no cartographic work signed by him, although two anonymous world maps have been attributed to him: the so-called Kunstmann II and the Egerton MS. 2803 On the other hand, he was admonished in 1510 for selling black market maps.
Americo continued to provide supplies for exploratory expeditions and in 1509 invested in an attempt to establish a colony in Veragua, which ended in failure and significant economic losses. Vespucci is credited with the idea of building ships in Vizcaya with lead-lined hulls to give them greater resistance on the treacherous reefs and shoals of Caribbean waters.
As a senior pilot, he had a salary of 75,000 maravedis per year, which allowed him to live comfortably but without great luxuries. He lived in a house on Del Rey Street, rented from his next-door neighbor, Bishop Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca.He had two white servants and five slaves: four women and one man. One of them, named Isabel, from the Canary Islands, gave birth to a boy and a girl in that same house. Based on certain indications from Vespucci's will, Consuelo Varela Bueno does not rule out that, as was not uncommon at the time, they were the navigator's own children.
Amerigo Vespucci died on February 22, 1512. In his only known will, he bequeathed his property in Seville to his wife, including 144,000 maravedis still owed to him by Berardi's heirs and a smaller amount owed by Juan de la Cosa; his property in Florence to his mother, if she was still alive, and if not to his brothers Antonio and Bernardo; and clothing, books, and instruments (including a metal astrolabe) to his his nephew Juan Vespucci, son of his brother Antonio de él He appointed the Florentine merchant Piero Rondinelli as executors of his will and the Canon Manuel Castaño. Her wife received a pension from the Crown by royal decree of March 28, 1512, on account of the services rendered by her husband as a senior pilot. Upon the death of María Cerezo, a decree of December 26, 1524 granted the rest of the pension to her sister Catalina de ella, which proves that she did not leave heirs. His will is preserved in the Archive of Notarial Protocols of Seville.
In his will, he asked to be buried in the church of San Miguel and, if that was not possible, in the church of the convent of San Francisco. He was buried in the church of San Miguel, where his wife's family had their pantheon, María Cerezo. The convent of San Francisco was demolished after the confiscation of 1835 and the church of San Miguel was demolished by the Revolutionary Junta in 1868. There is a belief that his tomb is currently in the church of Ognissanti de Florence.
Travel accounts attributed to Vespucci
Several texts written by Américo Vespucci or published using his name that mainly recount voyages of exploration to the New World have survived. Many historians have taken them as documentary evidence from which to deduce which expeditions Vespucci participated in and what were his dates and itineraries, trying to discern what was authentic from what was invented and what was actually written by the Florentine from what was added by other hands.. This has generated great controversy and theories that assign Vespucci from only two transoceanic voyages to six. Felipe Fernández-Armesto has recommended that these works be considered not so much as historical sources but above all as autobiographical literature and therefore subjective, propagandistic and probably a mixture of reality and fiction.
Six texts attributed to Vespucci have come down to our days that narrate his travels, real or invented; of them, four (or maybe five) are addressed to his former patron, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. They are all in letter format, even those that were printed for public release. In chronological order:
- Letter addressed to Pierfrancesco from Seville on July 18, 1500, which recounts a Castilian expedition made "with two carabelas" in 1499-1500. Six handwritten copies are preserved, none of the Vespucio hand but matching each other.
- Manuscript letter addressed to Pierfrancesco from Cabo Verde on June 4, 1501 during his trip to Portuguese ships; it was found and published in 1827. Essentially, it recounts a Portuguese expedition prior to India, led by Pedro Álvares Cabral.
- Third handwritten letter, also sent to Pierfrancesco from Lisbon upon returning from the Portuguese expedition, in 1502. It is known as the "Carta de Lisboa" and was discovered and published in 1789.
- Printed letter in Paris in 1504 with title Mundus NovusLatin. It relates the two trips mentioned in the previous handwritten letters and adds for the first time a previous one, a supposed Castilian expedition of 1497. It was a great editorial success and translated into several languages.
- fragments of a letter handwritten in Italian, without heading or dating. It was discovered by Roberto Ridolfi and published in 1937, so it is called Fragment Ridolfi or Fragmentary Charter. It is written in the form of defense against those who object to the truthfulness of the statements of previous letters. The addressee is not known.
- Printed letter in Florence circa 1505 with title Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quatro suoi viaggi (Letter from Américo Vespucio on the newly discovered islands on their four trips), commonly abbreviated Lettera. Add to the three trips narrated by Mundus Novus another later performed under Portuguese pavilion.
There are also many copies, editions and translations of this private mail, generally full of transcription and typographical errors. The main controversy centers on the so-called "public" letters: the fourth (Mundus Novus) and the sixth (Lettera).
There is also an abundance of correspondence from Amerigo's youth, which was found and presented to science by Ida Masetti Bencin and Mary Howard Smith only in 1902. These are 71 letters that were never compiled into a book and were barely seen print circulation. There is also a navigator's exercise book that was never published. These documents shed light on aspects of the character's life unrelated to his travels.
Letter of July 18, 1500
Six handwritten copies of a letter addressed to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Médici from Seville on July 18, 1500, recounting a Castilian expedition carried out "with two caravels" in 1499-1500. The six copies are practically identical although none is by the hand of Vespucci. It was first published by the Florentine abbot Angelo Maria Bandini in his Vita e lettere di Amerigo Vespucci gentiluomo fiorentino of 1745.
Vespucio does not explain what role he played in the expedition but, by not mentioning the captain's name and always telling the facts in the first person, the reader could assume that he was the one in command. According to the letter, the squadron departed on May 18, 1499 and made a stopover in the Canary Islands. From there they crossed "the Ocean Sea" and after 24 days of navigation they sighted land. Vespucci describes an island populated by cannibals and a heavily populated continental "mainland"; then an island whose inhabitants were tall compared to Europeans and another with "a very large population that had their houses built on the sea like Venice." He provides some data on latitude, longitude and distances but only mentions one place name: the Gulf of Paria, which makes it difficult for historians to establish the itinerary followed by the expedition, assuming that Vespucci's account is reliable. The letter insists on the nudity of the inhabitants of the discovered lands and narrates several battles in which the explorers killed a large number of indigenous people and looted and burned their homes, killing only two Europeans. He highlights the great linguistic diversity of these territories and mentions two abundant resources: cotton and brazilwood. During this exploration Vespucci was convinced that he was touring "the confines of Asia on the eastern side, and the beginning on the western side".
After 700 leagues, the letter continues, they decided to retire to Hispaniola to repair the ships and rest. Then they headed north to return to Europe, passing through some islands where they captured 232 indigenous people to sell them as slaves. Vespucci affirms that on their return they passed through the Azores, the Canary Islands and Madeira and finally reached Cádiz 13 months after leaving. On the return trip, 32 of the enslaved Indians died. Vespucci claims to be sick with quartan fever and claims to be preparing a new expedition to go and discover the island of Taprobana.
At the end of the letter he gives news of the trip of the Portuguese Vasco da Gama (whom he does not quote), who had just returned to Lisbon after circumnavigating Africa and arriving in Calicut in India. He tries to downplay it ("it's a route that all cosmography authors talk about") but acknowledges its great commercial success. The results of the Castilian expedition were probably considered disappointing compared to those of the Portuguese.
Astronomical Observations
The chart includes various astronomical information that was already well known to both academic cosmographers and navigators of the 15th century Thus, he explains that at the equator day and night lasted the same and mentions that after exceeding the Tropic of Cancer they were able to observe the phenomenon of the zenithal sun.
We sailed so much towards the midday that we entered the Nordic zone and within the circle of Cancer: and you must have by the way that in a few days, sailing through the Nordid zone we have seen the four shadows of the Sun, because the sun was in the cenit at noon.Modern to Spanish translation of the letter of July 18, 1500
It also indicates that they crossed the Earth's equator and reached a latitude of 6ºS (later on it says “six and a half degrees”), losing sight of the North Star. Navigation through these latitudes was not unusual at the time since, for example, Bartolomé Díaz had reached 34ºS of the Cape of Good Hope already in 1488. The determination of latitude south of the equator could theoretically be done by means of measurement of the height of the Sun and correction with the analemma, the same as in the northern hemisphere, but Vespucci does not mention this technique in his chart.
We both sail through the Nordic zone towards the austro part, which we find under the equinoccial line, and having one pole and the other at the end of our horizon, and we spend it for six degrees totally losing the stage star.
Vespucci claims to have unsuccessfully searched for an equivalent in the south of the North Pole Star in the northern hemisphere. The best candidate for him seems to have been a group of four stars that formed "like an almond", taking inspiration from some verses by Dante that he quotes:
And on the right back, I raised my mind to the other Pole, and saw four stars that only saw the primitive people.
How joyful the sky of your beautiful sparks! O widower North that you are eternally deprived of their sight!
The scene was immortalized at the end of the 16th century by the painter Jan van der Straet, who depicted Vespucci measuring the position of the Southern Cross. This constellation had already been spotted by many other European sailors and had also been known to the ancient Greeks, but celestial precession had ended up hiding it behind the European horizon. However, in Vespucci's chart no celestial cross is mentioned, but four stars "like an almond." In addition, on the date and latitude indicated, the stars of this constellation would not have been found forming a cross.
Vespucci also claims in the letter to have applied an astronomical method to calculate the longitude, based on a conjunction of the Moon with Mars, whose precise date and time he knew for the Ferrara meridian from his astrological tables. Observing the time of the conjunction in his position, he could calculate the distance in degrees between the reference meridian and his own longitude. Thus, he claims to have obtained a longitude value of 82.5º on the night of August 23, 1499. west of the meridian of Cádiz (not that of Ferrara).
As for the length I say, that I found so much difficulty that I had great work to find safely the way, that I had walked along the line of the length, and so worked that at last I found no better than to observe and see at night the position of one planet with another, and the movement of the Moon with the other planets because the planet of the Moon is faster in its course than any other, and I checked it with the Almanaque The reason for which I assign to each grade 16 leagues and two thirds is because according to Tolomeo and Alfragano, the land has a circumference of 24,000 [miles] worth 6,000 leagues, which, in 360 degrees, corresponds to each grade 16 leagues and two thirds, and this proportion I checked it many times with the point of the pilots, finding it true and good.
Vespucio does not give any indication of the territory he was in on August 23, 1499. According to the researcher Rolando Laguarda Trías, Vespucci's expedition could have been off Cape de la Vela (present-day Colombia).
Some historians, mainly Pohl, have given great relevance to this astronomical observation in the history of sea voyages. However, Fernández-Armesto has pointed out that the value given by Vespucci (82.5º from the meridian de Cádiz) is a mere copy of the one obtained by Christopher Columbus in 1494 when observing a lunar eclipse from Hispaniola, which suggests that Vespucci did not make any measurements but merely plagiarized the Admiral.
In later writings Vespucci claims to have sent a detailed report of his longitude calculation method to King Manuel I of Portugal but he dismissed it. watches and observation instruments available on board a ship in the 16th century
Letter from Cape Verde (June 4, 1501)
This is a handwritten letter addressed to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco from Cape Verde on June 4, 1501. It was found and published by Giovanni Battista Baldelli Boni in 1827.
In the letter Vespucci claims to have gone from Seville to Lisbon at the request of the King of Portugal. He says that he embarked in a squadron that departed on May 13, 1501, passed within sight of the Canary Islands and arrived at Cape Verde, "beginning of the province of Ethiopia", where he met two other Portuguese ships. who were returning from India. There is an independent account of this encounter, in the account written by one of the pilots returning to Portugal. This lends credibility to the fact that Vespucci actually took part in that expedition.
The rest of the letter consists of a summary of what the participants in the expedition to India told him, which is the one that had left in 1499 led by Pedro Álvares Cabral, whose name is not mentioned. Vespucci reports that the Portuguese, after stopping at the Cape Verde Islands, had crossed the Atlantic to the west and found a land (present-day Brazil) that "is the same land that I discovered for the King of Castile, except that it is more To the East". He then gives details about the lands visited by the Portuguese, mentioning a number of cities and islands in the Indian Ocean, including Calicut and an island he believes to be Taprobana. He mentions the existence of "very large ships" whose "sails are of rushes" and are not "made of iron but sewn with ropes." He makes an inventory of the cargo that ships bring, citing cinnamon, ginger, and other spices; porcelain, opium and precious stones.
Lisbon Charter (1502)
Handwritten letter sent, like the previous ones, to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de Medici from Lisbon upon returning from the Portuguese expedition in 1502. It was discovered in the Strozzi Collection and published by Francesco Bartolozzi in 1789. It is preserved in two copies virtually identical manuscripts, none in Vespucci's own handwriting.
In this letter Vespucci narrates a Portuguese exploration trip in which he embarked with a role that he does not mention, continuing the narrative begun in the letter from Cape Verde of June 4, 1501. There is independent confirmation of the existence of this expedition but Vespucci's letter is almost the only source on the itinerary and the vicissitudes of it. He claims that they sailed to the Cape Verde Islands and from there crossed the ocean to the west. After 64 days they made landfall in a place that Vespucci does not specify and explored the coast up to a latitude of 32ºS. They then went out into the ocean to a latitude that the chart puts at 50ºS without explaining how it was measured. of the world" since fifty and forty add up to ninety degrees, which is the fourth part of the earth's circumference. Years later this phrase would be misinterpreted when thinking that Vespucci meant that he had traveled a fourth continent.
The letter describes the flora, fauna, and inhabitants of these southern regions, who are naked, beardless, and have no religion or state but warfare. He says that they live in large houses and describes their diet and customs, including ritual cannibalism.
Vespucio acknowledges that the expedition did not achieve any economic benefit but excuses himself that the mission was only for exploration. He concludes the letter by announcing an upcoming work titled Travels and saying that he is waiting for what the King of Portugal decides to do with it.
Mundus Novus
In 1504 a Latin work titled Mundus Novus appeared in print in various European cities claiming to be a translated summary of a letter written in Italian by "Albericus Vespuccius" from Lisbon to Lorenzo de Pierfrancesco de Medici. It is believed that the first edition, at least of those that survived, was the one made in Augsburg and that the publishing success of the work led to new Latin editions in Venice and Paris (both in the same 1504), and later ones published in Rome, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Rostock Cologne and Antwerp. It was also translated into German, Dutch and Czech but not into Spanish. In 1507 Fracanzio de Montalbodo retranslated the Latin text into Italian (although he says that translated it from Spanish) and titled his work Paesi novamente retrovati et Novo Mondo da Alberico Vesputio florentino intitulato. This Italian version was so popular that Archangelo Madrignano translated it back into Latin and published it in Milan in 1508.
Mundus Novus recounts the voyage made by Vespucci in 1501 in a flotilla of three Portuguese ships, with information that seems correct but is written in a confusing way. As in the Cape Verde letter, it affirms that the explored coasts are continental mainland, not islands, and adds that this continent is "more densely populated (...) than our Europe or Asia or Africa" and that it is lawful call it Novum Mundum (New World). The author criticizes the incompetence of the Portuguese pilots and presents himself as a hero who, thanks to his knowledge of cosmography, saves the expedition. The work seems to be based on the authentic letters of Américo to Lorenzo written in 1501 and 1502 in Cape Verde and Lisbon, respectively, mixed with third-party editions that introduce embellishments, sensationalist news, and significant contradictions. For example, it details the beautiful bodies and activates sexual life of indigenous women, claims to have met a man who had eaten 300 others and maintains that the Earthly Paradise must be near the lands visited. There is an edition that contains a paragraph called Jocundus derived from the surname of Giovanni del Giocondo, its translator, where it is argued that the determination of latitude based on the position of the stars is a "sacrilegious audacity", denoting the dogmatic-religious conception of the person who wrote this portion of the document and his ignorance of the astronomical navigation techniques recommended by Vespucci.
Towards the end, the work mentions two trips that Vespucci would have made previously under the orders of the King of Castile "to the West", which he does not detail. He also announces that he is preparing a new expedition with two ships.
The Ridolfi Fragment
These are fragments of a handwritten letter in Tuscan, the Italian dialect of Florence, without heading or dating. It was discovered by Roberto Ridolfi in the Conti Archive and published in 1937, which is why it is called Ridolfi Fragment or also Fragmentary Letter. Only one handwritten copy survives, which was not written by Vespucci himself. The addressee is unknown, but from the language and content it can be deduced that it was a Florentine humanist versed in cosmography. The indignant tone suggests that it was not addressed to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco but someone more trusted, perhaps the scholar and geographer Zenobio Acciaiuoli or Vespucci's uncle Giorgio Antonio.
This letter is a written response to a list of objections raised by readers of his previous letters, for example about the distances he claims to have traveled or about his descriptions of the natives. In response to skepticism about his ability to measure longitude by astronomical observations, Vespucci replies that he used lunar eclipses as well as conjunctions of the Moon with the planets, and that he was 150 degrees east of Alexandria. This information is different from what is found in the famous letter of July 18, 1500. In this text Vespucci affirms, on the other hand, having participated in three navigations: two "to the western parts by the Ocean sea" and a third "to the south by the Atlantic Sea".
Today, no historian doubts the authenticity of this manuscript and that the author of the text was really Vespucci. they declared it apocryphal and tried to hide it, since the Ridolfi fragment demolished much of the arguments they had up to then.
The Letter to Soderini
The sixth letter, which had several different titles and is usually abbreviated to Lettera, The Four Voyages, or Letter to Soderini, was printed by first time in 1505 or perhaps late 1504, in Italian. A separate Latin edition, derived from a French translation, was printed at St. Dié by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507. The letter is dated Lisbon 10 December. September (or September 4, according to the versions) of 1504 and addressed to the head of state of Florence, a position held by Piero Soderini at that time. The Italian text of this letter is also preserved in several manuscripts. Based on philological analyses, it appears that the manuscripts may predate the printed editions of the Lettera.
The letter narrates in the first person four transatlantic voyages, with numerous episodes of great sensationalism; specifically:
- Expedition with four ships authorized by King Fernando de Castilla; departure from Cadiz on May 10, 1497 and return in 1498 or 1499.
- Castilian Expedition with three boats; departure from Cadiz on May 16, 1499 and return on September 8.
- Portuguese Expedition with three ships; departure from Lisbon on 10 May 1501 and return via Sierra Leone and the Azores on 7 September 1502.
- Portuguese Expedition with six ships to "Melacca"; departure on 10 May 1503 via the islands of Cape Verde and Sierra Leone and return on 18 June 1504.
Pohl argues that in reality Américo could never have written this letter to Soderini because the Vespucci family was at odds with the magistrate, to the point that by that time several of its members were involved in a plot to assassinate him. Vespucci's own nephew and disciple Giovanni was among the conspirators.
According to Pohl, the Lettera was written with the childish assumption that, to surpass the spectacularity of Columbus's four voyages, Vespucci would also have had to make four explorations. The first voyage had begun in 1497, which would have given Américo the title of the first European to set foot on the American continental mass, a year before Columbus. However, in different places in the Lettera a conflict is evident in the date of return to port of the supposed Vespucci: one paragraph mentions October 8, 1498, while another moves it to the 18th of the same month and a third takes him to a year later, on October 1, 1499. The second trip reported in the work, which occurred in 1499, coincides in time with the royal company in which Vespucci would have participated under the banner of Castile. Similarly, the third is none other than the authentic Portuguese voyage in which he enrolled in 1501. On the contrary, there is a division of opinion on whether Vespucci participated in the Portuguese expedition of 1503 or not.
The first texts of the Lettera contain gross linguistic errors, and include words that are nothing more than corruptions of terms that were a mixture of Spanish and Italian, which is difficult to explain in someone who, like Vespucci, enjoyed a privileged education. In reality —continues Pohl— its editors added and described in detail a large number of fantastic elements in their fabrications of the Florentine's explorations, in order to generate even more curiosity in readers and increase sales, which nevertheless turned out to be disappointing. In contrast, Vespucci's letters to Lorenzo were relatively cool, dispassionate, and factual.
Henry Harrisse gave a very different explanation for linguistic errors. According to him, Vespucci wrote the original story of him in Spanish or Portuguese. Northup specified that the source language was almost certainly Spanish. The work was later translated into Italian by someone who did not speak the source language. This theory has been supported by subsequent linguistic analyses.
For Fernández-Armesto, the editors of the Lettera made a copy-paste of many different sources, including some authentic texts by Vespucci and others published by Pedro Mártir de Angleria. In particular, the In the account of the first voyage, the editor used passages taken from Vespucci's handwritten letter of July 18, 1500, which however refers to the voyage of 1499-1500 which is presented in the Lettera as the b. The intent of the publisher(s) is unclear. Ilaria Caraci is of the opinion that this was not a clever forgery operation, as Pohl claimed, but that the Lettera is more a celebration of the exploits of a compatriot in which the historical truth is left in the background. background.
The Lettera was never published in Spain or Portugal, possibly because the population there was more familiar with the real story, and the Italian edition does not seem to have had much commercial success. On the contrary, the Latin version of Saint Dié spread rapidly throughout Europe. In 1509 a German translation was published in Strasbourg and in 1532 the Latin text of the Lettera was included in the cosmographic work published by Simon Grynaeus in Basel. A partial Italian translation was included in the monumental compilation of Navigationi et Viaggi published in Venice in 1550.
As has been said, these supposed epistles also place Vespucci as the first European to land on the mainland of the New World, one year before Columbus. They were published at a time when Columbus's son Ferdinand was engaged in lawsuits over the titles promised to his father as discoverer, so any eventual attempt by Vespucci to claim those territories would have outraged him; however, among Fernando's letters there is no mention of the Lettera nor of Américo's claims,[citation required] despite the fact that he possessed an edition of the Lettera in his library.
Third-party stories
There are two texts, called «Venetians», written by third parties that recount two other supposed transatlantic voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. These documents are almost unanimously considered apocryphal and the trips they recount have never been made:
- Letter from Girolamo Vianello to the Signoria of Venice, with date of Burgos of December 23, 1506, which relates a fifth trip, found by Leopoldo Ranke in the Sanuto Journal, in the Marciana Library of Venice and first published by Alexander von Humboldt in 1839.
- Letter from Francesco Corner to the Signoria of Venice, dated June 19, 1508, which briefly mentions that it would be a sixth trip, first published by Henry Harrisse in 1892.
The name of the New World
The islands and mainland found by the Iberian discoverers on the other side of the Atlantic had received various names, the application and acceptance of which was generally regional. Thus, the Castilians called it "the Indies" or "the Antipodes", a term that was also widely used among Italian humanists; the Portuguese baptized the Brazilian coasts as "Vera Cruz" or "Tierra de Santa Cruz". Christopher Columbus discovered in August 1498, during his third voyage, the mouth of the Orinoco River and, seeing its enormous flow, deduced that the land in which he found himself was "another world (...) a huge land ». According to Fernández-Armesto, this must have been the source on which Vespucci relied to affirm that the coast he traveled on his voyage of 1499 was continental mainland. In 1504, at the latest, Pedro Mártir de Angleria coined the term "New Mundo» for the new lands, which also appears in the Mundus Novus attributed to Vespucci.
However, recent studies have pointed out that the fact of recognizing the discovered coasts as mainland or continental instead of as an island does not mean that Vespucci thought that it was a new continent, different from the three known since Antiquity. On the contrary, Vespucci probably thought that the new lands were an extension of Asia.
Several editors worked in the printing house of the abbey of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in Lorraine and were impressed by reading the publications that claimed to narrate Vespucian exploits: they had received a copy translated into French of the Lettera and another from the Mundus Novus, among the many that circulated throughout Europe.
They decided to publicize the new news in the form of a small treatise called Cosmographiae introductio accompanied by a Latin translation of the Lettera under the title Quattuor Americi navigationes (Four voyages of Americo), and publish them in the form of a pamphlet. On April 25, 1507, the first two editions left the workshop. In chapter IX of the text it was suggested that the name of the New World should be America (feminine by analogy to Europe, Asia and Africa) in honor of whoever recognized it as such: ab Americo Inventore (...) quasi Americi terram sive Americam (From Américo the discoverer (...) as if it were the land of Américo or America). It is not known with certainty which of the printers was the inventor of the name. The Gymnase Vosgien (Gymnasium of the Vosges) was made up of Vautrin Lud, Nicolás Lud, Jean Basin, Mathias Ringmann and Martín Waldseemüller. Specialists favor Ringmann or Jean Basin de Sandacourt, the translator of Mundus Novus into Latin.
Martín Waldseemüller, a prominent German humanist and professor of cartography who served as the group's draftsman and proofreader, inscribed the resounding name on a large wall map titled Universalis Cosmographia that he included in the pamphlet. There it appears applied to South America (the first of the three Americas to be called that). In the upper part of the map, on the left, next to a terrestrial globe in whose hemisphere the Old World is represented, a portrait of Ptolemy appears; on the right, next to a similar globe with the New World, that of Vespucci. In addition, Waldseemüller made a globular version, also called a map in spindles or segments, with which a small globe of about 11 cm in diameter could be built, one of whose copies would be given as a gift to the Duke of Lorraine. The voice has such euphony and is so consonant with the words "Asia" and "Africa" which immediately became established in the northern European languages. The Cosmographiae Introductio was a great publishing success, and the word "America" quickly spread to other cartographic works: the Green Globe (ca. 1514), a book and a globe on spindles by Johann Schöner in 1515, a map printed in Salamanca in 1520 and a reduced and modified version of Waldseemüller's map published by Petrus Apianus also in 1520 under the title Tipus Orbis Universalis, although its definitive consolidation came with the inclusion in the maps of Sebastian Münster from 1540.
However, Waldseemüller himself rectified this in a map shortly afterwards (1513) included in an edition of Claudius Ptolemy's Geographia, calling the new continent "Terra incognita" and stating that its discoverer had been Columbus, not Vespucci. The name of America that also took a long time to be adopted in the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies, where the name mostly used continued to be "West Indies" for quite some time.
Waldseemüller's planisphere, of which a print run of a thousand copies was made, was lost but was found in 1901 by Professor Joseph Fischer inside a forgotten book in Wolfegg Castle. The spindle map used to construct the sphere had been recovered in 1871.
Posterity
Amerigo Vespucci is remembered mainly because the American continent today bears his name, due to the travel accounts collected in the Letter to Soderini, which today are considered largely imaginary. There is only consensus about his participation in the fifth European expedition that landed on the coast of Brazil and in Ojeda's trip from 1499-1500 that visited present-day Venezuela, whose name has historically been attributed to him. According to this theory, in what is now known as the Gulf of Venezuela, Ojeda's crew observed the aboriginal houses erected on wooden stilts that protruded from the water, built by the Añú indigenous people. These houses, which bore the name of stilt houses, would have reminded Vespucci of the city of Venice in Italy, which inspired him to give the name Venezziola (Little Venice) and later hispanized "Venezuela" to the region and the gulf of the country American.
His work as a cosmographer is less famous. He was one of the first to describe the Gulf Stream, [citation needed ] previously discovered by Antón de Alaminos. He explained a method for estimating positional longitude by studying lunar cycles and planetary conjunctions. It has also been affirmed that he was the first to affirm that the new lands discovered by Columbus did not belong to Asia but were a separate continent, although other authors consider this interpretation wrong since the writings attributed to Vespucci never affirmed that the "new world" It was surrounded entirely by water.In his time he was considered a good cartographer but none of his maps survive today.
16th century
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The attribution of the discovery of America to Vespucci, on his voyage in 1497, by the authors of the Cosmographiae introductio reached great diffusion in the XVI Pedro Apiano collected this thesis in his influential manual published in 1524 under the title Cosmographicus liber, which spread throughout Europe. In the 1540s, Nicolás Copernicus mentioned in his work that America was named after its discoverer.
In Spain, however, criticism soon arose. Sebastian Cabot accused Vespucci shortly after his death of having lied to appropriate the glory of the discovery of the New World. Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, a great defender of the figure of Columbus, who was unaware that the Lettera had probably not actually been written by Vespucci, accused the Florentine of being a "liar" and & # 34; thief & # 34;, denouncing that he had stolen the glory that, according to him, belonged by right to the Admiral:
(...) [to] pretend tacitly to apply to his journey and to himself the discovery of the firm land, usurping Admiral Christopher Columbus what was so rightly owed to him. (...) The new continent should have been called Columba, and not as it is unjustly called, America.
In his Historia general de Indias, de las Casas slams Vespucci's name and denies his achievements, in view of what he sees as a long-considered plan by Vespucci to get the world to recognize him as discoverer of most of the Indies.
17th and 18th centuries
Antonio de Herrera, Spanish historian of the XVII century, identified the falsehoods of the Letter to Soderini. For the next century and a half, the majority opinion was that the name America had been the result of a fraud.
Fray de Espinosa, in a work from 1623, summarizes the thought of Spain at the time about Vespucci:
(...) he refers to be called Colon Colon, and not America. And I do not know on what basis Américo Vespucio has usurped it, poor sailor, who did not pass to those parts of the first, nor did he do anything remarkable for his name to be eternalized with the glory of such discovery, for he was not the one who did it.
The 18th century Scottish historian William Robertson in his History of America, calls Vespucci "a happy impostor". Of the same opinion was the French Voltaire.
Only in Florence, Vespucci's birthplace, did he continue to defend his priority as discoverer of the American continent. In 1745 the Florentine Angelo Maria Bandini published the first of the handwritten letters in which Vespucci narrated his travels. At the end of the century Francesco Bartolozzi published that of 1502. Both used their findings to defend the veracity of the writings published under the name of Vespucci, the Mundus Novus and the Letter to Soderini.
19th century
Alexander von Humboldt, was the first to apply the scientific method to the study of the voyages of Vespucci, in the second volume of his Examen de l'histoire de la Géographie du Nouveau Continent aux XV et XVI siècles . Humboldt concluded that the priority of the discovery of America corresponded to Columbus and not to Vespucci but he exonerated the latter of the accusations that were made of fraud because, according to Humboldt, the printed letters (Mundus Novus and Lettera) had been confusedly and ineptly edited and distorted by other hands. Countless research papers followed, such as those by Armand Pascal d'Avézac (1858), Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1858 to 1872), Henry Harrisse (1892), John Fiske (1892), Henry Vignaud (1916), etc. The methodical scholar Gustavo Uzielli collected 280 works on Vespucci in 1892, and even so his collection was far from complete.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, controversy continued between supporters and detractors of Vespucci. Among those skeptical about its merits are the Portuguese geographer Manuel Ayres de Cazal, the Spanish historian Martín Fernández de Navarrete, the Portuguese astronomer and essayist Duarte Leite, the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the British editor Clements Markham. of Vespucci's letters in English. These authors, in view of the contradictions of Mundus Novus with the Lettera and of these with the rest of the correspondence, minimize the value documentary of these writings, reducing them to simple opportunistic fabrications made with the purpose of gaining notoriety and titles.
20th and 21st centuries
In the XX century, new documents relating to Vespucci were discovered, including his testament and the Ridolfi Fragment . In 1924 the Italian scholar Alberto Magnaghi concluded, like Humboldt, that the Mundus Novus and the Lettera were apocryphal; in his opinion the first constitutes a juxtaposition of previous obituaries plus various alterations carried out with some skill, and the second an almost total forgery; however, in his conception, it is the private correspondence to Pierfrancesco that does offer authentic and invaluable evidence. Magnaghi then dismisses the existence of the "first" and "fourth" Vespucci's voyage (Castilian voyage of 1497 and Portuguese voyage of 1502), arguing that there is solid evidence that he never made them.The American historian Frederick J. Pohl reached similar conclusions in 1944, as did Felipe Fernández-Armesto in 2006.
The greatest controversy among historians, especially Hispanic Americans, has focused on the controversy over the discovery of the Río de la Plata. Magnaghi credited the Portuguese expedition of 1501 reported by Vespucci with the discovery of the Río de la Plata and eastern Patagonia up to 50 degrees south. The Uruguayan historian Rolando Laguarda Trías qualified this thesis, limiting exploration to the 45ºS parallel, while the Argentine academic Enrique de Gandía attributed to Vespucci the discovery of La Plata, the Patagonian coast and the Malvinas Islands and maintained that the Florentine would have made five voyages in total.
In Compton's Encyclopaedia of 1985, a work for school use, Vespucci is described as "an unimportant Florentine merchant". The first American monument in his memory was erected in 1987 in the city of Bogotá.
In the 1990s, the Italian Ilaria Luzzana Caraci published a compilation of all the documents related to Vespucci and an analysis of his life and work in which, although he acknowledged that his experience as a navigator was "disputable", he insisted on the importance of identifying South America as a new continent distinct from Asia. In 2002 this author directed, commissioned by the Italian government, a conference on the Portuguese voyage of Vespucci from 1501-1502, the culminating point of several exhibitions and conferences on this character.
Attributed real or imaginary trips
Castilian trip of 1497-1498/99
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According to the Lettera, Vespucci's first voyage would have taken place in 1497. The name of the fleet commander is not mentioned, having been evoked those of Juan Díaz de Solís, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón and Juan de la Cosa by various historians. After beginning the trip on May 10, 1497 with four caravels, always according to the Lettera, the only source of this supposed trip, they headed for the Canary Islands and after making a stopover they straightened their course to the west. After twenty-seven or thirty-seven days of travel, they made landfall at a point 16 degrees north and 75 degrees west of the Canaries, where they were well received by the natives with feasts and magnificent meals; They also offered them various material gifts and even their own wives. The text provides little geographical information from there, limiting itself to saying that they traveled the coast to the northwest for 870 leagues and that they passed through a region called Lariab or Parias, which was under the Tropic of Cancer. However, Varnhagen speculated in 1858 that they sailed through the Gulf of Mexico and along the east coast of the United States as far as the Gulf of Saint Lawrence; this theory was accepted by authors such as Harrisse, Vignaud, Levillier and Germán Arciniegas. After fighting a battle with the natives, they decided to return to Castilla, through a stopover on the island of Iti, where they again entered into a fight with the natives, taking about 250 prisoners. They arrived in Cádiz in October 1498 or 1499 (the Lettera is contradictory about the date).
Currently, most historians believe that this voyage is a later invention unrelated to Vespucci, whose account includes true parts of the authentic voyage of 1499 under the command of Alonso de Ojeda. Others believe instead that it was real, based on two maps immediately after 1499 (Juan de la Cosa's world map of 1500 and Cantino's planisphere of 1502), where according to them the Gulf of Mexico and the peninsula of La Florida. This interpretation is not shared by most cartographic historians.
Castilian journey of 1499-1500
On May 16 or 18, 1499, Vespucci claims to have left Cádiz on an expedition that historians identify with the one led by Alonso de Ojeda, who was accompanied by Juan de la Cosa and other famous navigators such as Diego Martín Chamorro, Juan Sánchez, José López and Francisco Morales. Vespucci's role in the expedition is unknown. According to his later writings, he was the paramount commander of two ships, which is known to be false. He could not have been a pilot either, since he had no nautical experience at the time. Perhaps his knowledge of pearls was the reason for his presence.
Vespucci's account of this expedition is found in copies of two letters and a fragment of another. One of them is dated in Seville on July 18, 1500 and addressed to a "magnificent Lorenzo" who is probably Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Médici. Amerigo's version contradicts all other sources on the trip, and makes the reconstruction of his itinerary difficult.
The most widely accepted reconstruction of Ojeda's voyage is the following. After leaving Andalusia, they headed for the Canary Islands and from there they sailed for 24 days until they saw land, then traveling along the northern margin of South America. Vespucci advanced to Cape San Agustín (also called Consolación), at about 6º south latitude; he believed there to be near a route to Asia. In June 1500, after advancing two more degrees, he decided to return to Europe because his crew was tired and mentally deteriorated, first taking the route to the Caribbean along the coast: there he explored the mouth of the Amazon River. He reached Trinidad Island, sighted the mouths of the Essequibo and Orinoco rivers and explored the latter in some detail. He crossed the Gulf of Paria, passed through Margarita Island and then through what he called "De los Gigantes"; (present-day Curaçao), where he tried to kidnap a young woman to take her to Castilla as a sample and failed due to the resistance of the inhabitants. The name of Venezuela has historically been attributed to Vespucci, who would have accompanied Alonso de Ojeda in this 1499 expedition along the northwestern coast of the country, today known as the Gulf of Venezuela. The crew observed the aboriginal houses erected on wooden stilts that protruded from the water, built by the Añú indigenous people. These houses, which were called stilt houses, would have reminded Vespucci of the city of Venice in Italy (Venezia, in Italian), which inspired him to give the name Venezziola or Venezuela ('Little Venice') to the region. The expedition skirted the Guajira peninsula to Cabo de la Vela. During all this course he took notes on the fauna and flora; he likewise described the appearance and customs of the natives; In Cubagua he exchanged trinkets for pearls and other treasures from the aborigines. The following month he arrived in Hispaniola.
They continued on to the Lucayas to capture slaves. Amerigo was still convinced that he was sailing to the eastern end of Asia, where Ptolemy believed that there was a peninsula where the market of Catigara was located. He then sought the end of this stretch of land, which he called "Cabo Catigara". He believed that past this point to the south one reached the great sea that washed the southern Asian coasts.
Américo claims to have returned to Spain sick with fever.
Portuguese Journey of 1501-1502
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King Manuel I of Portugal sent an exploratory expedition to Brazil to investigate the territories described by Pedro Álvares Cabral. Vespucci took part in it, with a role that is unknown. The name of the captain of the company is also not known; according to some authors it was Gonzalo Coelho.
In May 1501 (sources indicate May 10, 13, or 31) the expedition set sail with the purpose, according to Pohl, of finding the Strait of Catigara, which Ptolemy had believed led to Asia. They passed through the Canary Islands without stopping, reaching Bezeneghe (present-day Dakar) and then heading to the Cape Verde Islands. After a brief stay there, the flotilla began the crossing of the Atlantic on June 15. This journey was very painful and it took more than sixty days to cross the narrow part of the ocean, when Columbus had only taken thirty-seven days to cross the wide part. At the beginning of August they arrived at the coasts of present-day Brazil, at a point that Vespucci does not mention and that modern historians place between Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte.
They sailed south along the coast of South America. According to Varnhagen, they first resighted Cape San Agustín (October 28); then they continued naming the geographical features in the style of the time, based on the Catholic saints: Cabo de San Roque (October 16), Todos los Santos Bay (November 1), the Santa Lucía River (December 13), December), etc. On January 1, 1502, they arrived at Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro.
According to Arciniegas, on February 15, upon reaching the point on the coast where the Portuguese thought that the Treaty of Tordesillas had established the limit of the jurisdictions between Portugal and Castilla y Aragón, a discussion would have occurred between the navigators about the route to follow. Vespucci considered it essential to continue revealing the extension of the New World to the south, while the commander thought otherwise, in view of the illegality of the act. Finally, the Florentine would have prevailed. Father Ayres de Cazal mentions the finding at a coastal point at 25.º35'S (referred to as the entrance of the "Canaanea river", a name coined after Vespucci) of a piece of marble measuring 80 by 40 by 20 centimeters embedded in the ground and sculpted with the coat of arms of Portugal. Magnaghi believes that the column could only have been placed in 1502 by the expedition that Vespucci was on.
The expedition continued south but its exact route is unknown. Vespucci limits himself to affirming that they reached a latitude of 50ºS and noted the concealment of the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper below the horizon in the four months and twenty-six days in which they remained south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Pohl supposed that they would have continued skirting the continent, discovering the Río de la Plata and then Patagonia, in present-day Argentina; Arciniegas makes it to the Strait of Magellan, the Malvinas Islands and South Georgia. On the other hand, others Authors such as Ernesto Basilico hold totally opposite opinions: "Vespucio did not discover either the Río de la Plata or Patagonia, and, therefore, he was not the forerunner of Solís or Magellan".
Finally they started back. According to the Lettera, the flotilla arrived on the coast of Sierra Leone on May 10, 1502, set fire to one of its ships, which was in a terrible state, and remained on land for fifteen days. He continued towards the Azores islands, where he arrived at the end of July. He stayed there for another fortnight and returned to Lisbon on September 7, 1502. According to the author of Mundus Novus , supposedly Vespucci, the lands visited by the Portuguese on this trip were part of a continent he calls The new World.
Portuguese Journey of 1503-1504
According to the Lettera, the only and doubtful account of this supposed trip by Américo Vespucci, King Manuel I of Portugal would have prepared another expedition under the orders of Gonzalo Coelho, which upset the Florentine, as he did not share the commander's navigation plans and believed him presumptuous and stubborn. Financed according to Levillier by Fernando de Noronha, the flotilla of six ships left on May 10, 1503 and its main objective was to discover the location of the island of Malacca.
As the Lettera continues, they headed to Sierra Leone, where they spent time exploring in the midst of very bad weather conditions. On June 10, 1503, they made landfall on the Cape Verde Islands; Shortly after they undertook a course towards the Bay of All Saints. In the middle of crossing the Atlantic, they came across the small archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, which Vespucci judged a "true wonder of nature." There the fleet dispersed: in the Lettera the supposed Vespucci affirms that Coelho's flagship, whom he constantly criticizes, went down. The documentary records of the time do not make any mention or reference to the incident. Vespucci continued his journey to Brazil with the only two ships he had. He navigated the coast of the continent to the vicinity of the Río de la Plata and returned by the same route. He built a small fort, in which he left twenty-four sailors along with food for six months, twelve bombards and other weapons, loaded the ships with brazilwood and, forced by the smallness of his crew and the lack of tackle, he returned to Portugal., anchoring in Lisbon on June 18, 1504.
Castilian journey of 1504-1506
According to a letter from Girolamo Vianello, a Venetian at the service of the Crown of Castile to the Signoria of Venice, dated December 23, 1506 in Burgos, Vespucci ("Almerigo fiorentino") would have participated in a journey led by " Zuan biscaino» (probably Juan de la Cosa), whose survivors had returned to Spain some time before.
Always according to Vianello, this army explored some indefinite coasts of the American continent, where it entered into combat several times with indigenous people, both on land and at sea. The Castilians got many pearls but lost all their ships, which were more than three, and were isolated on the mainland for 96 days, suffering the siege of the Indians in a makeshift fortress and many deaths from disease. At the end of that time, 34 survivors left for Española Island aboard boats whose railings had grown, while 10 volunteers remained in the fortress. The batels managed to reach Hispaniola and from there some survivors returned to Spain aboard two caravels.
Vianello's epistolary record shows him to be a credible source, and the official records of Venice and the dates of issue and receipt of the letter prove that it is authentic. In addition, there is evidence that Juan de la Cosa returned in 1506 from a trip to the Indies that he had undertaken two years earlier, in 1504. However, there is abundant documentation in the archives of the Casa de Contratación that shows that Vespucci was in Castile in June 1505 and also from September 1506.
In general, historiography tends to deny the existence of this trip or at least Vespucci's participation in it. Only Arciniegas admitted that Vespucci was able to participate in a brief trip of at most three months, barely enough time to pay a very brief visit, perhaps to the Pearl Coast, in the Caribbean.
Castilian trip of 1507/1508
The route of the 1505 trip would have been repeated by De la Cosa and Vespucci two or three years later. As with the previous trip, there is no direct documentary evidence that this actually happened, so it is usually rejected by modern historiography. The only and very brief reference to this undertaking is given by the Venetian ambassador to the court of Castile, Francesco Corner, in one of his letters to his Signoría, written from Burgos on June 19, 1508, in which he states that the expedition would finally arrive on the mainland with the purpose of transshipping gold.
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