Critical and Bibliographical

NOTES ON VESPUCIUS

AND THE

NAMING OF AMERICA.

BY THE EDITOR.

WHILE Vespucius never once clearly affirms that he discovered the main, such an inference may be drawn from what he says. Peter Martyr gives no date at all for the voyage of Pinzon and Solis to the Honduras coast, which was later claimed by Oviedo and Gomara to have preceded that of Columbus to the main. Navarrete has pointed out the varied inconsistencies of the Vespucius narrative, as well as the changes of the dates of the setting out and the return, as given in the various editions. All of them give a period of twenty-nine months for a voyage which Vespucius says only took eighteen,—a difficulty Canovai and others have tried to get over by changing the date of return to 1498; and some such change was necessary to enable Vespucius to be in Spain to start again with Ojeda in May, 1499. Humboldt further instances a great variety of obvious typographical errors in the publications of that day,—as, for instance, where Oviedo says Columbus made his first voyage in 1491. But, as shown in the preceding narrative, an allowance for errors of the press is not sufficient. In regard to the proof of an alibi which Humboldt brought forward from documents said to have been collected by Muñoz from the archives of the Casa de la Contratacion, it is unfortunate that Muñoz himself did not complete that part of his work which was to pertain to Vespucius, and that the documents as he collated them have not been published. In the absence of such textual demonstration, the inference which Humboldt drew from Navarrete’s representations of those documents has been denied by Varnhagen; and H. H. Bancroft in his Central America (i. 99, 102, 106) does not deem the proof complete.

Vespucius’ own story for what he calls his second voyage (1499) is that he sailed from Cadiz shortly after the middle of May, 1499. The subsequent dates of his being on the coast are conflicting; but it would appear that he reached Spain on his return in June or September, 1500. We have, of course, his narrative of this voyage in the collective letter to Soderini; but there is also an independent narrative, published by Bandini (p. 64) in 1745, said to have been written July 18, 1500, and printed from a manuscript preserved in the Riccardiana at Florence. The testimony of Ojeda that Vespucius was his companion in the voyage of 1499-1500 seems to need the qualification that he was with him for a part, and not for the whole, of the voyage; and it has been advanced that Vespucius left Ojeda at Hispaniola, and, returning to Spain, sailed again with Pinzon in December, 1499,—thus attempting to account for the combination of events which seem to connect Vespucius with the voyages of both these navigators.

It is noteworthy that Oviedo, who sought to interpret Peter Martyr as showing that Solis and Pinzon had preceded Columbus to the main, makes no mention of Vespucius. There is no mention of him in what Beneventano furnished to the Ptolemy of 1508. Castanheda does not allude to him, nor does Barreiros in his De Ophira regione (Coimbra, 1560), nor Galvano in his Descobrimientos, nor Pedro Magalhaes de Gandavo in his account of Santa Cruz (1576).

But it was not all forgetfulness as time went on. The currency to his fame which had been given by the De orbe antarctica, by the Paesi novamente, by the Cosmographiæ introductio, as well as by the Mundus novus and the publications which reflected these, was helped on in 1510 by the Roman archæologist Francesco Albertini in his Opusculum de mirabilibus Urbis Romæ, who finds Florence, and not Genoa, to have sent forth the discoverer of the New World.

Two years later (1512) an edition of Pomponius Mela which Cocleus edited, probably at Nuremberg, contained, in a marginal note to a passage on the “Zona incognita,” the following words: “Verus Americus Vesputius iam nostro seculo | novū illū mundū invenissefert Portugalie Castilieq. regū navibus,” etc. Pighius in 1520 had spoken of the magnitude of the region discovered by Vespucius, which had gained it the appellation of a new world. The references in Glareanus, Apian, Phrysius, and Münster show familiarity with his fame by the leading cosmographical writers of the time. Natale Conti, in his Universæ historiæ sui temporis libri XXX (1545-1581), brought him within the range of his memory. In 1590 Myritius, in his Opusculum geographicum, the last dying flicker, as it was, of a belief in the Asian connection of the New World, repeats the oft-told story,—“De Brasilia, terrâ ignis, de meridionali parte Africæ ab Alberico Vesputio inventa.”

In the next century the story is still kept up by the Florentine, Francesco Bocchi, in his Libri duo elogiorum (1607), and by another Florentine, Raffael Gualterotti, in a poem, L’ America (1611),—not to name many others.

But all this fame was not unclouded, and it failed of reflection in some quarters at least. The contemporary Portuguese pilots and cosmographers give no record of Vespucius’ eminence as a nautical geometrician. The Portuguese annalist Damião de Goes makes no mention of him. Neither Peter Martyr nor Benzoni allows him to have preceded Columbus. Sebastian Cabot, as early as 1515, questioned if any faith could be placed in the voyage of 1497 “which Americus says he made.” It is well known that Las Casas more than intimated the chance of his being an impostor; nor do we deduce from the way that his countrymen, Guicciardini and Segni, speak of him, that their faith in the prior claim in his behalf was stable.

An important contestant appeared in Herrera in 1601, who openly charged Vespucius with falsifying his dates and changing the date of 1499 to 1497; Herrera probably followed Las Casas’ manuscripts which he had. The allegation fell in with the prevalent indignation that somebody, rather than a blind fortune, had deprived Columbus of the naming of the New World; and Herrera helped this belief by stating positively that the voyage of Pinzon and Solis, which had been depended upon to antedate Columbus, had taken place as late as 1506.

In the last century Angelo Maria Bandini attempted to stay this tide of reproach in the Vita e lettere di Amerigo Vespucci, gentiluomo fiorentino, which was printed at Florence in 1745. It was too manifestly an unbounded panegyric to enlist the sympathy of scholars. More attention was aroused by an address, with equal adulation, which Stanislao Canovai delivered to the Academy at Cortona in 1788, and which was printed at once as Elogio di Amerigo Vespucci, and various times afterward, with more or less change, till it appeared to revive anew the antagonism of scholars, in 1817. Muñoz had promised to disclose the impostures of Vespucius, but his uncompleted task fell to Santarem, who found a sympathizer in Navarrete; and Santarem’s labored depreciation of Vespucius first appeared in Navarrete’s Coleccion, where Canovai’s arguments are examined at length, with studied refutations of some points hardly worth the labor. This paper was later expanded, as explained in another place.

He claims that one hundred thousand documents in the Royal Archives of Portugal, and the register of maps which belonged to King Emmanuel, make no mention of Vespucius, and that there is no register of the letters-patent which Vespucius claimed to have received. Nor is there any mention in several hundred other contemporary manuscripts preserved in the great library at Paris, and in other collections, which Santarem says he has examined.

An admirer of Vespucius, and the most prominent advocate of a belief in the disputed voyage of 1497, is Francisco Adolpho de Varnhagen, the Baron de Porto Seguro. As early as 1839, in notes to his Diario of Lopez de Souza, he began a long series of publications in order to counteract the depreciation of Vespucius by Ayres de Cazal, Navarrete, and Santarem. In 1854, in his Historia geral do Brazil, he had combated Humboldt’s opinion that it was Pinzon with whom Vespucius had sailed on his second voyage, and had contended for Ojeda. Varnhagen not only accepts the statements of the St.-Dié publications regarding that voyage, but undertakes to track the explorer’s course. In his Amerigo Vespucci, son caractère, etc., he gives a map marking the various voyages of the Florentine. For the voyage of 1497 he makes him strike a little south of west from the Canaries; but leaving his course a blank from the mid-Atlantic, he resumes it at Cape Gracias a Dios on the point of Honduras, and follows it by the coast thence to the Chesapeake, when he passes by Bermuda, and reaches Seville. In this he departs from all previous theories of the landfall, which had placed the contact on the coast of Paria. He takes a view of the Ruysch map of 1508 different from that of any other commentator, in holding the smaller land terminated with a scroll to be not Cuba, but a part of the main westerly, visited by Vespucius in this 1497 voyage; and recently Harrisse, in his Cortereal, argues that the descriptions of Vespucius in this disputed voyage correspond more nearly with the Cantino map than with any other. Harrisse also asks if Waldseemüller did not have such a map as Cantino’s before him; and if the map of Vespucius, which Peter Martyr says Fonseca had, may not have been the same?

Varnhagen, as might be expected in such an advocate, turns every undated incident in Vespucius’ favor if he can. He believes that the white-bearded men who the natives said preceded the Spaniards were Vespucius and his companions. A letter of Vianello, dated Dec. 28, 1506, which Humboldt quotes as mentioning an early voyage in which La Cosa took part, but hesitates to assign to any particular year, Varnhagen eagerly makes applicable to the voyage of 1497. The records of the Casa de la Contratacion which seem to be an impediment to a belief in the voyage, he makes to have reference, not to the ships of Columbus, but to those of Vespucius’ own command. Varnhagen’s efforts to elucidate the career of Vespucius have been eager, if not in all respects conclusive.

We get upon much firmer ground when we come to the consideration of the voyage of 1501,—the first for Portugal, and the third of Vespucius’ so-called four voyages. It seems clear that this voyage was ordered by the Portuguese Government to follow up the chance discovery of the Brazil coast by Cabral in 1500, of which that navigator had sent word back by a messenger vessel. When the new exploring fleet sailed is a matter of uncertainty, for the accounts differ,—the Dutch edition of the account putting it as early as May 1, 1501, while one account places it as late as June 10. When the fleet reached the Cape de Verde Islands, it found there Cabral’s vessels on the return voyage; and what Vespucius here learned from Cabral he embodied in a letter, dated June 4, 1501, which is printed by Baldelli in his Il Milione di Marco Polo, from a manuscript preserved in the Riccardiana Collection. Some time in August—for the exact day is in dispute—he struck the coast of South America, and coursed southward,—returning to Lisbon Sept. 7, 1502.

Vespucius now wrote an account of it, addressed to Lorenzo Piero Francesco de Medici, in which he proposed a designation of the new regions, “novum mundum appellare licet.” Such is the Latin phraseology, for the original Italian text is lost. Within the next two years numerous issues of Giocondo’s Latin text were printed, only two of which are dated,—one at Augsburg in 1504, the other at Strasburg in 1505; and, with a few exceptions, they all, by their published title, gave currency to the designation of Mundus novus.

The earliest of these editions is usually thought to be one Alberic’ vespucci’ laurētio petri francisci de medicis Salutem plurimā dicit, of which a fac-simile of the title is annexed, and which bears the imprint of Jehan Lambert. It is a small plaquette of six leaves; and there are copies in the Lenox and Carter-Brown collections. D’Avezac, and Harrisse, in his later opinion (Additions, p. 19), agree in supposing this the first edition. The dated (1504) Augsburg edition, Mundus novus, is called “extraordinarily rare” by Grenville, who had a copy, now in the British Museum. On the reverse of the fourth and last leaf we read: “Magister Johānes otmar: vindelice impressit Auguste Anno millesimo quingentesimo quarto.” There are copies in the Lenox and Carter-Brown libraries. An edition, Mundus novus, whose four unnumbered leaves, forty lines to the full page, correspond wholly with this last issue, except that for the dated colophon the words Laus Deo are substituted, was put at first by Harrisse at the head of the list, with this title. There is a copy in the Lenox Library, which has another issue, Mundus novus, also in black-letter, forty-two lines to the page; still another, Mundus novus, forty lines to the page; and another, with the words Mundus novus in Roman, of eight leaves, thirty lines to the page. At this point in his enumeration Harrisse placed originally the Jehan Lambert issue (mentioned above), and after it a Mundus novus printed in Paris by Denys Roce, of which only a fragment (five leaves) exists, sold in the Libri sale in London, 1865, and now in the British Museum. Another Paris edition, Mundus novus, printed by Gilles de Gourmont, eight leaves, thirty-one lines to the page, is, according to Harrisse, known only in a copy in the Lenox Library; but D’Avezac refers to a copy in the National Library in Paris.

FIRST PAGE OF MUNDUS NOVUS.

Harrisse, no. 29. Cf. Navarrete, Opúsculos i. 99.

Another Mundus novus is supposed by Harrisse to have been printed somewhere in the lower Rhineland, and to bear the mark of Wm. Vorsterman, of Antwerp, on the last leaf, merely to give it currency in the Netherlands. It has four leaves, and forty-four lines to the full page. There are copies in the Lenox and Harvard College libraries. The Serapeum for January, 1861, describes a Mundus novus as preserved in the Mercantile Library at Hamburg,—a plaquette of four leaves, with forty-five lines to the page,—which seems to differ from all others. Later, in his Additions (1872), Harrisse described other issues of the Novus mundus which do not seem to be identical with those mentioned in his Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima. One of these—Mūdus novus, printed in a very small gothic letter, four leaves—he found in the Biblioteca Cosatenense at Rome. The other has for the leading title, Epistola Albericii: de novo mundo,—a plaquette of four leaves, forty-eight lines to the page, with map and woodcut.

This letter of Vespucius was again issued at Strasburg in 1505, with the title Be [De] ora antarctica, as shown in the annexed fac-simile; and joined with this text, in the little six-leaved tract, was a letter of Philesius to Bruno, and some Latin verses by Philesius; and in this form we have it probably for the last time in that language. This Philesius we shall encounter again later.

It was this Latin rendering by Giocondo, the architect, as Harrisse thinks, upon which the Italian text of the Paesi novamente was founded. Varnhagen in his Amerigo Vespucci, son caractère (p. 13), prints side by side this Italian and the Latin text, marking different readings in the latter. In this same year (1505) the first German edition was issued at Nuremberg, though it is undated: Von der new gefundē Region die wol ein welt genennt mag werden durch den cristenlichen Künig von Portugall wunnderbarlich erfunden. The colophon shows that this German version was made from a copy of the Latin text brought from Paris in May, 1505: Ausz latein ist dist missiue in Teütsch gezogē ausz dem exemplar das von Parisz kam ym maien monet nach Christi geburt, Funfftzenhundert vnnd Fünffjar. Gedruckt yn Nüremburg durch Wolffgang Hueber. The full page of this edition has thirty-seven lines.

Another edition, issued the same year (1505), shows a slight change in the title, Von der neü gefunden Region so wol ein welt genempt mag werden, durch den Christēlichen künig, von Portigal wunderbarlich erfunden. This is followed by the same cut of the King, and has a similar colophon. Its full page contains thirty-three lines.

Still another edition of the same year and publisher shows thirty-five lines to the page, and above the same cut the title reads: Von der neu gefunden Region die wol ein welt genent mag werden durch den Cristenlichen künig von portigal wunderbarlich erfunden.

This is the copy described in the Carter-Brown Catalogue (vol. i. no. 26), and seems to correspond to the copy in the Dresden Library, of which fac-similes of the title and its reverse are given herewith.

Harrisse cites a copy in the British Museum (Grenville), which has thirty-five lines to the page, with the title: Vonderneüw gefunden Region, etc. It is without date and place; but Harrisse sets it under 1505, as he does another issue, Von der Neüwen gefundē Region, of which he found a copy in the Royal Library at Munich, and still another, Von den Nawen Insulen unnd Landen, printed at Leipsic.

In 1506 there were two editions,—one published at Strasburg, Von den Nüwe Insulē und landen (eight leaves); and the other at Leipsic, Von den newen Insulen und Landen (six leaves).

In 1508 there was, according to Brunet, a Strasburg edition, Von den Neüwen Insulen und Landen. There was also a Dutch edition, Van der nieuwer werelt, etc., printed at Antwerp by Jan van Doesborgh, which was first made known by Muller, of Amsterdam, through his Books on America (1872, no. 24). It is a little quarto tract of eight leaves, without date, printed in gothic type, thirty and thirty-one lines to the page, with various woodcuts. It came from an “insignificant library,”—that of the architect Bosschaert,—sold in 1871 in Antwerp, and was bound up with three other tracts of the first ten years of the sixteenth century. It cost Muller 830 florins, and subsequently passed into the Carter-Brown Library, and still remains unique. Muller had placed it between 1506 and 1509; but Mr. Bartlett, in the Carter-Brown Catalogue (vol. i. no. 38), assigns it to 1508. Muller had also given a fac-simile of the first page; but only the cut on that page is reproduced in the Carter-Brown Catalogue (i. 46), as well as a cut showing a group of four Indians, which is on the reverse of the last leaf. Mr. Carter-Brown printed a fac-simile edition (twenty-five copies) in 1874 for private distribution.

That portion of the Latin letter which Vespucius addressed to Soderini on his four voyages differs from the text connected with Giocondo’s name, and will be found in the various versions of the Paesi novamente and in Grynæus, as well as in Ramusio (i. 128), Bandini (p. 100), and Canovai in Italian, and in English in Kerr’s Voyages (vol. iii., 1812, p. 342) and in Lester (p. 223). There are also German versions in Voss, Allerälteste Nachricht von den neuen Welt (Berlin, 1722), and in Spanish in Navarrete’s Coleccion (iii. 190).

There is another text, the “Relazione,” published by Francesco Bartolozzi in 1789, after it had long remained in manuscript; it also is addressed to the same Lorenzo. If the original account as written by Vespucius himself was in Portuguese and addressed to King Manoel, it is lost.

Of the Vespucius-Coelho voyage we have only the account which is given in connection with the other three, in which Vespucius gives May 10 as the date of sailing; but Coelho is known to have started June 10, with six ships. Varnhagen has identified the harbor, where he left the shipwrecked crew, with Port Frio. Returning, they reached Lisbon June 18 (or 28), and on the 4th of the following September Vespucius dated his account.

If we draw a line from Nancy to Strasburg as the longer side of a triangle, its apex to the south will fall among the Vosges, where in a secluded valley lies the town of St.-Dié. What we see there to-day of man’s work is scarcely a century and a half old; for the place was burned in 1756, and shortly after rebuilt. In the early part of the sixteenth century St.-Dié was in the dominion of Duke René of Lorraine. It had its cathedral and a seminary of learning (under the patronage of the Duke), and a printing-press had been set up there. The reigning prince, as an enlightened friend of erudition, had drawn to his college a number of learned men; and Pico de Mirandola, in addressing a letter to the editor of the Ptolemy of 1513, expressed surprise that so scholarly a body of men existed in so obscure a place. Who were these scholars?

The chief agent of the Duke in the matter seems to have been his secretary, Walter Lud or Ludd, or Gualterus Ludovicus, as his name was latinized. The preceding narrative has indicated his position in this learned community, and has cited the little tractate of four leaves by him, the importance of which was first discovered, about twenty years ago, by Henry Stevens, and of which the only copies at present known are in the British Museum and the Imperial Library at Vienna. From this tiny Speculum, as we shall see, we learn some important particulars. Just over the line of Lorraine, and within the limits of Alsace, there was born and had lived a certain Mathias Ringmann or Ringman. In these early years of the century (1504) he was a student in Paris among the pupils of a certain Dr. John Faber,—to be in other ways, as we shall see, connected with the development of the little story now in progress. In Paris at the same time, and engaged in building the Notre Dame bridge, was the Veronese architect Fra Giovanni Giocondo. Major thinks there is great reason for believing that the young Alsatian student formed the acquaintance of the Italian architect, and was thus brought to entertain that enthusiasm for Vespucius which Giocondo, as a countryman of the navigator, seems to have imparted to his young friend. At least the little that is known positively seems to indicate this transmission of admiration.

We must next revert to what Vespucius himself was doing to afford material for this increase of his fame. On his return from his last voyage he had prepared an account at full length of his experiences in the New World, “that coming generations might remember him.” No such ample document, however, is now known. There was at this time (1504) living in Florence a man of fifty-four, Piero Soderini, who two years before, had been made perpetual Gonfaloniere of the city. He had been a schoolmate of Vespucius; and to him, dating from Lisbon, Sept. 4, 1504, the navigator addressed an account of what he called his four voyages, abstracted as is supposed from the larger narrative. The original text of this abstract is also missing, unless we believe, with Varnhagen, that the text which he gives in his Amerigo Vespucci, son caractère, etc. (p. 34), printed at Lima in 1865, is such, which he supposes to have been published at Florence in 1505-1506, since a printed copy of an Italian text, undated, had been bought by him in Havana (1863) in the same covers with another tract of 1506. Other commentators have not placed this Italian tract so early. It has not usually been placed before 1510. Dr. Court put it before 1512. Harrisse gave it the date of 1516 because he had found it bound with another tract of that date; but in his Additions, p. xxv, he acknowledges the reasons inconclusive. Major contends that there is no reason to believe that any known Italian text antedates the Latin, yet to be mentioned. This Italian text is called Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi ... Data in Lisbona a di 4 di Septembre, 1504. It is a small quarto of sixteen leaves.

Varnhagen does not question that the early Italian print is the better text, differing as it does from Bassin’s Latin; and he follows it by preference in all his arguments. He complains that Bandini and Canovai reprinted it with many errors.

Ramusio in his first volume had reprinted that part of it which covers the third and fourth voyage; and it had also been given in French in the collection of Jean Temporal at Lyons in 1556, known otherwise as Jean Leon’s (Leo Africanus) Historiale description de l’Afrique, with a preface by Ramusio.

It is Major’s belief that the original text of the abstract intended for Soderini was written in a sort of composite Spanish-Italian dialect, such as an Italian long in the service of the Iberian nations might acquire, and that a copy of it coming into the possession of Vespucius’ countryman, Giocondo, in Paris, it was by that architect translated into French, and at Ringmann’s suggestion addressed to René and intrusted to Ringmann to convey to the Duke, of whom the Alsatian felt proud, as an enlightened sovereign whose dominions were within easy reach of his own home. Major also suggests that the preliminary parts of the narrative, referring to the school-day acquaintance of Vespucius with the person whom he addressed, while it was true of Soderini, was not so of René; but, being retained, has given rise to confusion. Lud tells us only that the letters were sent from Portugal to René in French, and Waldseemüller says that they were translated from the Italian to the French, but without telling us whence they came.

We know, at all events, that Ringmann returned to the Vosges country, and was invited to become professor of Latin in the new college, where he taught thereafter, and that he had become known, as was the fashion, under the Latin name of Philesius, whose verses have already been referred to. The narrative of Vespucius, whether Ringmann brought it from Paris, or however it came, was not turned from the French into Latin by him, but, as Lud informs us, by another canon of the Cathedral, Jean Bassin de Sandacourt, or Johannes Basinus Sandacurius, as he appears in Lud’s Latin.

Just before this, in 1504, there had joined the college, as teacher of geography, another young man who had classicized his name, and was known as Hylacomylus. It was left, as has been mentioned, for Humboldt (Examen critique, iv. 99) to identify him as Martin Waltzemüller,—who however preferred to write it Waldseemüller.

It was a project among this St.-Dié coterie to edit Ptolemy, and illustrate his cosmographical views, just as another coterie at Vienna were engaged then and later in studying the complemental theories of Pomponius Mela. Waldseemüller, as the teacher of geography, naturally assumed control of this undertaking; and the Duke himself so far encouraged the scheme as to order the engraving of a map to accompany the exposition of the new discoveries,—the same which is now known as the Admiral’s map.

In pursuance of these studies Waldseemüller had prepared a little cosmographical treatise, and this it was now determined to print at the College Press at St.-Dié. Nothing could better accompany it than the Latin translation of the Four Voyages of Vespucius and some verses by Philesius; for Ringmann, as we have seen, was a verse-maker, and had a local fame as a Latin poet. Accordingly, unless Varnhagen’s theory is true, which most critics are not inclined to accept, these letters of Vespucius first got into print, not in their original Italian, but in a little Latin quarto of Waldseemüller, printed in this obscure nook of the Vosges. Under the title of Cosmographiæ introductio, this appeared twice, if not oftener, in 1507.

To establish the sequence of the editions of the Cosmographiæ introductio in 1507 is a bibliographical task of some difficulty, and experts are at variance. D’Avezac (Waltzemüller, p. 112) makes four editions in 1507, and establishes a test for distinguishing them by taking the first line of the title, together with the date of the colophon; those of May corresponding to the 25th of April, and those of September to the 29th of August:—

1. Cosmographiæ introdu—vij kl’ Maij.
2. Cosmographiæ introductio—vij kl’ Maij.
3. Cosmographiæ—iiij kl’ Septembris.
4. Cosmographiæ introdu—iiij kl’ Septembris.

The late Henry C. Murphy maintained that nos. 1 and 4 in this enumeration are simply made up from nos. 2 and 3 (the original May and September editions), to which a new title,—the same in each case,—with the substitution of other leaves for the originals of leaves 1, 2, 5, and 6,—also the same in each case,—was given. Harrisse, however, dissents, and thinks D’Avezac’s no. 1 a genuine first edition. The only copy of it known was picked up on a Paris quay for a franc by the geographer Eyriès, which was sold at his death, in 1846, for 160 francs, and again at the Nicholas Yéméniz sale (Lyons, no. 2,676), in 1867, for 2,000 francs. It is now in the Lenox Library.

Of the second of D’Avezac’s types there are several copies known. Harrisse names the copies in the Lenox, Murphy, and Carter-Brown collections. There is a record of other copies in the National Library at Rio Janeiro, in the Royal Library at Berlin, in the Huth Collection in London, and in the Mazarine Library in Paris,—a copy which D’Avezac calls “irréprochable.” Tross held a copy in 1872 for 1,500 francs. Waldseemüller’s name does not appear in these early May issues, which are little quartos of fifty-two leaves, twenty-seven lines to the full page, with an inscription of twelve lines, in Roman type, on the back of the folding sheet of a skeleton globe.

On the 29th of August (iiij kl’ Septembris) it was reissued, still without Waldseemüller’s name, of the same size, and fifty-two leaves; but the folding sheet bears on the reverse an inscription in fifteen lines. The ordinary title is D’Avezac’s no. 3. Harrisse mentions the Lenox and Carter-Brown copies; but there are others in Harvard College Library (formerly the Cooke copy, no. 625, besides an imperfect copy which belonged to Charles Sumner), in Charles Deane’s Collection, and in the Barlow Library. The Murphy Library had a copy (no. 680) in its catalogue, and the house of John Wiley’s Sons advertised a copy in New York in 1883 for $350.

There are records of copies in Europe,—in the Imperial Library at Vienna, in the National Library at Paris, and in the Huth Collection (Catalogue, i. 356) in London. D’Avezac (Waltzemüller, pp. 54, 55) describes a copy which belonged to Yéméniz, of Lyons. Brockhaus advertised one in 1861 (Trömel, no. 1). Another was sold in Paris for 2,000 francs in 1867. There was another in the Sobolewski sale (no. 3,769), and one in the Court Catalogue (no. 92). Leclerc, 1878 (no. 599), has advertised one for 500 francs, Harrassowitz, 1881, (no. 309) one for 1,000 marks, and Rosenthal, of Munich, in 1884 (no. 30) held one at 3,000 marks. One is also shown in the Catalogue of the Reserved and Most Valuable Portion of the Libri Collection (no. 15).

The latter portion of the book, embracing the Quattuor Americi Vesputii navigationes, seems to have been issued also separately, and is still occasionally found.

What seems to have been a composite edition, corresponding to D’Avezac’s fourth, made up, as Harrisse thinks (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 47), of the introductory part of D’Avezac’s first and the voyages of his third edition, is also found, though very rarely. There is a copy in the Lenox Library of this description, and another, described by Harrisse, in the Mazarine Library in Paris.

It was in this precious little quarto of 1507, whose complicated issues we have endeavored to trace, that, in the introductory portion, Waldseemüller, anonymously to the world, but doubtless with the privity of his fellow-collegians, proposed in two passages, already quoted, but here presented in fac-simile, to stand sponsor for the new-named western world; and with what result we shall see.

It was a strange sensation to name a new continent, or even a hitherto unknown part of an old one. There was again the same uncertainty of continental lines as when Europe had been named by the ancients, for there was now only the vaguest notion of what there was to be named. Columbus had already died in the belief that he had only touched the eastern limits of Asia. There is no good reason to believe that Vespucius himself was of a different mind. So insignificant a gain to Europe had men come to believe these new islands, compared with the regions of wealth and spices with which Vasco da Gama and Cabral had opened trade by the African route, that the advocate and deluded finder of the western route had died obscurely, with scarcely a record being made of his departure. A few islands and their savage inhabitants had scarcely answered the expectation of those who had pictured from Marco Polo the golden glories of Cathay.

To Columbus himself the new-found regions were only “insulæ Indiæ super Gangem,”—India east of the Ganges; and the “Indies” which he supposed he had found, and for whose native races the Asiatic name was borrowed and continues to abide, remained the Spanish designation of their possessions therein, though distinguished in time by the expletive West Indies. It never occurred to the discoverers themselves to give a new name to regions which they sometimes designated generically as Mundus Novus or Alter Orbis; but it is doubtful as Humboldt says, if they intended by such designation any further description than that the parts discovered were newly found, just as Strabo, Mela, Cadamosto and others had used similar designations. It was at a much later day, and when the continental character of the New World was long established, that some Spaniard suggested Colonia, or Columbiana; and another, anxious to commemorate the sovereigns of Castile and Leon, futilely coined the cumbrous designation of Fer-Isabelica. When Columbus and others had followed a long stretch of the northern coast of South America without finding a break, and when the volume of water pouring through the mouths of the Orinoco betokened to his mind a vast interior, it began to be suspected that the main coast of Asia had been found; and the designation of Tierra firme was naturally attached to the whole region, of which Paria and the Pearl coast were distinguishable parts. This designation of Firm Land was gradually localized as explorations extended, and covered what later was known as Castilla del Oro; and began to comprehend in the time of Purchas, for instance, all that extent of coast from Paria to Costa Rica.

When Cabral in 1500 sighted the shores of Brazil, he gave the name of Terra Sanctæ Crucis to the new-found region,—the land of the Holy Cross; and this name continued for some time to mark as much as was then known of what we now call South America, and we find it in such early delineations as the Lenox globe and the map of Sylvanus in 1511. It will be remembered that in 1502, after what is called his third voyage, Vespucius had simply named the same region Mundus Novus.

Thus in 1507 there was no general concurrence in the designations which had been bestowed on these new islands and coasts; and the only unbroken line which had then been discovered was that stretching from Honduras well down the eastern coast of South America, if Vespucius’ statement of having gone to the thirty-second degree of southern latitude was to be believed. After the exploration of this coast,—thanks to the skill of Vespucius in sounding his own exploits and giving them an attractive setting out, aided, probably, by that fortuitous dispensation of fortune which sometimes awards fame where it is hardly deserved,—it had come to pass that the name of Vespucius had, in common report, become better associated than that of Columbus with the magnitude of the new discoveries. It was not so strange then as it appears now that the Florentine, rather than the Genoese, was selected for such continental commemoration. All this happened to some degree irrespective of the question of priority in touching Tierra Firme, as turning upon the truth or falsity of the date 1497 assigned to the first of the voyages of Vespucius.

The proposing of a name was easy; the acceptance of it was not so certain. The little tract had appeared without any responsible voucher. The press-mark of St.-Dié was not a powerful stamp. The community was obscure, and it had been invested with what influence it possessed by the association of Duke René with it.

This did not last long. The Duke died in 1508, and his death put a stop to the projected edition of Ptolemy and broke up the little press; so that next year (1509), when Waldseemüller planned a new edition of the Cosmographiæ introductio, it was necessary to commit it to Grüninger in Strasburg to print. In this edition Waldseemüller first signed his own name to the preface. Copies of this issue are somewhat less rare than those of 1507. It is a little tract of thirty-two leaves, some copies having fourteen, others fifteen, lines on the back of the folding sheet. The Lenox Library has examples of each.

There are other copies in the Carter-Brown (Catalogue, vol. i. no. 40), Barlow, and Harvard College libraries. Another is in the Force Collection, Library of Congress, and one was sold in the Murphy sale (no. 681). The copy which belonged to Ferdinand Columbus is still preserved in Seville; but its annotations do not signify that the statements in it respecting Vespucius’ discoveries attracted his attention. It was this edition which Navarrete used when he made a Spanish version for his Coleccion (iii. 183) D’Avezac used a copy in the Mazarine Library; and other copies are noted in the Huth (i. 356) and Sunderland (Catalogue, vol. v. no. 12,920) collections. The account of the voyages in this edition was also printed separately in German as Diss buchlin saget wie die zwē ... herrē, etc.

While the Strasburg press was emitting this 1509 edition it was also printing the sheets of another little tract, the anonymous Globus mundi, of which a fac-simile of the title is annexed, in which it will be perceived the bit of the New World shown is called “Newe welt,” and not America, though “America lately discovered” is the designation given in the text. The credit of the discovery is given unreservedly to Vespucius, and Columbus is not mentioned.

The breaking up of the press was a serious blow to the little community at St.-Dié. Ringmann, in the full faith of completing the edition of Ptolemy which they had in view, had brought from Italy a Greek manuscript of the old geographer; but the poet was soon to follow his patron, for, having retired to Schlestadt, his native town, he died there in 1511 at the early age of twenty-nine. The Ptolemy project, however, did not fail. Its production was transferred to Strasburg; and there, in 1513, it appeared, including the series of maps associated ever since with the name of Hylacomylus, and showing evidences in the text of the use which had been made of Ringmann’s Greek manuscript.

TITLE OF THE 1509 (STRASBURG) EDITION.

We look to this book in vain for any attempt to follow up the conferring of the name of Vespucius on the New World. The two maps which it contains, showing the recent discoveries, are given in fac-simile on pages 111 and 112. In one the large region which stands for South America has no designation; in the other there is supposed to be some relation to Columbus’ own map, while it bears a legend which gives to Columbus unequivocally the credit of the discovery of the New World. It has been contended of late that the earliest cartographical application of the name is on two globes preserved in the collection of the Freiherr von Hauslab, in Vienna, one of which (printed) Varnhagen in his paper on Apianus and Schöner puts under 1509, and the other (manuscript) under 1513. Weiser in his Magalhâes-Strasse (p. 27) doubts these dates. The application of the new name, America, we also find not far from this time, say between 1512 and 1515, in a manuscript mappemonde (see p. 125) which Major, when he described it in the Archæologia (xl. p. 1), unhesitatingly ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci, thinking that he could trace certain relations between Da Vinci and Vespucius. This map bears distinctly the name America on the South American continent. Its connection with Da Vinci is now denied.

Not far from the same time a certain undated edition of the Cosmographiæ introductio appeared at Lyons, though no place is given. Of this edition there are two copies in the British Museum, and others in the Lenox and Barlow collections; but they all lack a map, which is found in a copy first brought to public attention by the bookseller Tross, of Paris, in 1881, and which is now owned by Mr. C. H. Kalbfleisch, of New York. Its date is uncertain. Harrisse (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 63) placed it first in 1510, but later (Cabots, p. 182) he dated it about 1514, as Tross had already done. D’Avezac (Waltzemüller, p. 123) thinks it could not have been earlier than 1517.

The chief interest of this map to us is the fact that it bears the words “America noviter reperta” on what stands for South America; and there is fair ground for supposing that it antedates all other printed maps yet known which bear this name.

At not far from the same time, fixed in this instance certainly in 1515, we find America on the earliest known globe of Schöner. Probably printed to accompany this globe, is a rare little tract, issued the same year (1515) at Nuremberg, under the title of Luculentissima quædā terræ totius descriptio. In this Schöner speaks of a “fourth part of the globe, named after its discoverer, Americus Vespucius, a man of sagacious mind, who found it in 1497,” adopting the controverted date.

Meanwhile the fame of Vespucius was prospering with the Vienna coterie. One of them, Georg Tanstetter, sometimes called Collimitius, was editing the De natura locorum librum of Albertus Magnus; and apparently after the book was printed he made with type a marginal note, to cite the profession of Vespucius that he had reached to fifty degrees south, as showing that there was habitable land so far towards the Southern Pole.

Joachim Watt, or Vadianus, as he was called in his editorial Latin, had in 1515 adopted the new name of America, and repeated it in 1518, when he reproduced his letter in his edition of Pomponius Mela, as explained on another page. Apian had been employed to make the mappemonde for it, which was to show the new discoveries. The map seems not to have been finished in time; but when it appeared, two years later (1520), in the new edition of Solinus, by Camers, though it bore the name of America on the southern main, it still preserved the legend in connection therewith which awarded the discovery to Columbus. Watt now quarrelled with Camers, for they had worked jointly, and their two books are usually found in one cover, with Apian’s map between them. Returning to St. Gall, Vadianus practised there as a physician, and reissued his Mela at Basle in 1522, dedicating it to that Dr. Faber who had been the teacher of Ringmann in Paris eighteen years before.

In 1522 Lorenz Friess, or Laurentius Phrysius, another of Duke René’s coterie, a correspondent of Vespucius, published a new edition of Ptolemy at the Grüninger press in Strasburg, in which the fame of Columbus and Vespucius is kept up in the usual equalizing way. The preface, by Thomas Ancuparius, sounds the praises of the Florentine, ascribing to him the discovery “of what we to-day call America;” the Admiral’s map, Tabula Terre Nove, which Waldseemüller had published in the 1513 edition, is once more reproduced, with other of the maps of that edition, re-engraved on a reduced scale. The usual legend, crediting the discovery to Columbus, is shown in a section of the map, which is given in another place. Phrysius acknowledges that the maps are essentially Waldseemüller’s, though they have some changes and additions; but he adds a new mappemonde of his own, putting the name America on the great southern main,—the first time of its appearing in any map of the Ptolemy series. A fac-simile is annexed.

There is thus far absolutely no proof that any one disputed the essential facts of the discovery by Columbus of the outlying islands of Asia, as the belief went, or denied him the credit of giving a new world to the crowns of Aragon and Castile, whether that were Asia or not. The maps which have come down to us, so far as they record anything, invariably give Columbus the credit. The detractors and panegyrists of Vespucius have asserted in turn that he was privy to the doings at St.-Dié and Strasburg, and that he was not; but proof is lacking for either proposition. No one can dispute, however, that he was dead before his name was applied to the new discoveries on any published map.

If indeed the date of 1497, as given by the St.-Dié publication, was correct, there might have been ground for adjudging his explorations of the mainland to have antedated those of Columbus; but the conclusion is irresistible that either the Spanish authorities did not know that such a claim had been made, or they deemed the date an error of the press; since to rely upon the claim would have helped them in their conflict with the heirs of Columbus, which began the year following the publication of that claim, or in 1508 and continued to vex all concerned till 1527; and during all that time Vespucius, as has been mentioned, is not named in the records of the proceedings. It is equally hard to believe that Ferdinand Columbus would have passed by a claim derogating from the fame of his father, if it had come to him as a positive assertion. That he knew of the St.-Dié tract we have direct evidence in his possession of a copy of it. That it did not trouble him we know also with as much confidence as negative testimony can impart; for we have no knowledge of his noticing it, but instead the positive assertion of a contemporary that he did not notice it.

The claim for Vespucius, however, was soon to be set up. In 1527 Las Casas began, if we may believe Quintana, the writing of his Historia. It is not easy, however, to fix precisely the year when he tells us that the belief had become current of Vespucius being really the first to set his foot on the main. “Amerigo,” he tells us further, “is said to have placed the name of America on maps, thus sinfully failing toward the Admiral. If he purposely gave currency to this belief in his first setting foot on the main, it was a great wickedness; and if it was not done intentionally, it looks like it.” Las Casas still makes allowances, and fails of positive accusation, when again he speaks of “the injustice of Amerigo, or the injustice perhaps those who printed the Quattuor navigationes appear to have committed toward the Admiral;” and once more when he says that “foreign writers call the country America: it ought to be called Columba.” But he grows more positive as he goes on, when he wonders how Ferdinand Columbus, who had, as he says, Vespucius’ account, could have found nothing in it of deceit and injustice to object to.

Who were these “foreign writers?” Stobnicza, of Cracow, in the Introductio in Claudii Ptholomei cosmographiā, which he published in 1512, said: “Et ne soli Ptolomeo laborassem, curavi etiam notas facere quasdam partes terre ipsi ptolomeo alijsque vetustioribus ignotas que Amerii vespucij aliorumque lustratione ad nostram noticiam puenere.” Upon the reverse of folio v., in the chapter “De meridianis,” occurs: “Similiter in occasu ultra africam & europam magna pars terre quam ab Americo eius reptore Americam vocant vulgo autem novus mundus dicitur.” Upon the reverse of folio vii. in the chapter “De partibus terre” is this: “Non solū aūt pdicte tres ptes nunc sunt lacius lustrate, verum & alia quata pars ab Americo vesputio sagacis ingenii viro inventa est, quam ab ipso Americo eius inventore Ameriḡem si a americi terram sive americā appellari volunt cuius latitudo est sub tota torrida zona,” etc. These expressions were repeated in the second edition in 1519.

Apian in 1524 had accepted the name in his Cosmographicus liber, as he had in an uncertain way, in 1522, in two editions, one printed at Ratisbon, the other without place, of the tract, Declaratio et usus typi cosmographici, illustrative of his map.

Glareanus in 1529 spoke of the land to the west “quam Americam vocant,” though he couples the names of Columbus and Vespucius in speaking of its discovery. Apian and Gemma Phrysius in their Cosmographia of the same year recognize the new name; and Phrysius again in his De principiis astronomiæ, first published at Antwerp in 1530, gave a chapter (no. xxx.) to “America,” and repeated it in later editions. Münster in the Novus orbis of 1532 finds that the extended coast of South America “takes the name of America from Americus, who discovered it.” We find the name again in the Epitome trium terræ partium of Vadianus, published at Tiguri in 1534, and in Honter’s Rudimentorum cosmographiæ libri, published at Basle in the same year. When the Spanish sea-manual, Medina’s Arte de navegar, was published in Italian at Venice in 1544, it had a chart with America on it; and the De sphæra of Cornelius Valerius (Antwerp, 1561) says this fourth part of the world took its name from Americus.

Thus it was manifest that popular belief, outside of Spain, at least, was, as Las Casas affirms, working at last into false channels. Of course the time would come when Vespucius, wrongfully or rightfully, would be charged with promoting this belief. He was already dead, and could not repel the insinuation. In 1533 this charge came for the first time in print, so far as we now know, and from one who had taken his part in spreading the error. It has already been mentioned how Schöner, in his globe of 1515, and in the little book which explained that globe, had accepted the name from the coterie of the Vosges. He still used the name in 1520 in another globe. Now in 1533, in his Opusculum geographicum ex diversorum libris ac cartis summa cura & diligentia collectum, accomodatum ad recenter elaboratum ab eodem globum decriptionis terrenæ. Ioachimi Camerarii. Ex urbe Norica, ... Anno XXXIII, he unreservedly charged Vespucius with fixing his own name upon that region of India Superior which he believed to be an island.

In 1535, in a new edition of Ptolemy, Servetus repeated the map of the New World from the editions of 1522 and 1525 which helped to give further currency to the name of America; but he checks his readers in his text by saying that those are misled who call the continent America, since Vespucius never touched it till long after Columbus had. This cautious statement did not save Servetus from the disdainful comment of Gomara (1551), who accuses that editor of Ptolemy of attempting to blacken the name of the Florentine.

It was but an easy process for a euphonious name, once accepted for a large part of the new discoveries, gradually to be extended until it covered them all. The discovery of the South Sea by Balboa in 1513 rendered it certain that there was a country of unmistakably continental extent lying south of the field of Columbus’ observations, which, though it might prove to be connected with Asia by the Isthmus of Panama, was still worthy of an independent designation. We have seen how the Land of the Holy Cross, Paria, and all other names gave way in recognition of the one man who had best satisfied Europe that this region had a continental extent. If it be admitted even that Vespucius was in any way privy to the bestowal of his name upon it, there was at first no purpose to enlarge the application of such name beyond this well-recognized coast.

That the name went beyond that coast came of one of those shaping tendencies which are without control. “It was,” as Humboldt says, “accident, and not fraud and dissensions, which deprived the continent of America of the name of Columbus.” It was in 1541, and by Mercator in his printed gores for a globe, that in a cartographical record we first find the name America extended to cover the entire continent; for he places the letters AME at Baccalaos, and completed the name with RICA at the La Plata. Thus the injustice was made perpetual; and there seems no greater instance of the instability of truth in the world’s history. Such monstrous perversion could but incite an indignation which needed a victim,—and it found him in Vespucius. The intimation of Schöner was magnified in time by everybody, and the unfortunate date of 1497, as well as the altogether doubtful aspect of his Quattuor navigationes, helped on the accusation. Vespucius stood in every cyclopædia and history as the personification of baseness and arrogance; and his treacherous return for the kindness which Columbus did him in February, 1505, when he gave him a letter of recommendation to his son Diego, at a time when the Florentine stood in need of such assistance, was often made to point a moral. The most emphatic of these accusers, working up his case with every subsidiary help, has been the Viscount Santarem. He will not admit the possibility of Vespucius’ ignorance of the movement at St.-Dié. “We are led to the conclusion,” he says, in summing up, “that the name given to the new continent after the death of Columbus was the result of a preconceived plan against his memory, either designedly and with malice aforethought, or by the secret influence of an extensive patronage of foreign merchants residing at Seville and elsewhere, dependent on Vespucius as naval contractor.”

It was not till Humboldt approached the subject in the fourth and fifth volumes of his Examen critique de l’histoire et de la géographie du nouveau monde that the great injustice to Vespucius on account of the greater injustice to Columbus began to be apparent. No one but Santarem, since Humboldt’s time, has attempted to rehabilitate the old arguments. Those who are cautious had said before that he might pardonably have given his name to the long coast-line which he had tracked, but that he was not responsible for its ultimate expansion. But Humboldt’s opinion at once prevailed, and he reviewed and confirmed them in his Cosmos. Humboldt’s views are convincingly and elaborately enforced; but the busy reader may like to know they are well epitomized by Wiesener in a paper, “Améric Vespuce et Christophe Colomb: la véritable origine du nom d’Amérique,” which was published in the Revue des questions historiques (1866), i. 225-252, and translated into English in the Catholic World (1867), v. 611.

The best English authority on this question is Mr. R. H. Major, who has examined it with both thoroughness and condensation of statement in his paper on the Da Vinci map in the Archæologia, vol. xl., in his Prince Henry the Navigator (pp. 367-380), and in his Discoveries of Prince Henry, chap. xiv. Harrisse in his Bibl. Amer. Vet., pp. 65, 94, enumerates the contestants on the question; and Varnhagen, who is never unjust to Columbus, traces in a summary way the progress in the acceptance of the name of America in his Nouvelles recherches sur les derniers voyages du navigateur Florentin. In German, Oscar Peschel in his Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen (book ii. chap. 13) has examined the matter with a scholar’s instincts. The subject was followed by M. Schoetter in a paper read at the Congrès des Américanistes at Luxemburg in 1877; but it is not apparent from the abstract of the paper in the Proceedings of that session (p. 357) that any new light was thrown upon the matter.

Professor Jules Marcou would drive the subject beyond the bounds of any personal associations by establishing the origin of the name in the native designation (Americ, Amerrique, Amerique) of a range of mountains in Central America; and Mr. T. H. Lambert, in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (no. 1 of 1883), asks us to find the origin in the name given by the Peruvians to their country,—neither of which theories has received or is likely to receive any considerable acceptance.