NO ONE KNOWS WHAT VESPUCCI LOOKED LIKEAmerica is so named because in 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer who made a cut-out map for do-it-yourself globemakers, fell for a forgery called the Soderini Letter that implied Vespucci had discovered a new world. That world was described as being populated by giants, cannibals and nymphomaniacs, the latter inevitably included in most accounts during this phase of the Age of Discovery because travel writing was the most popular genre and such titillating if inaccurate details sold books.
Despite prodigious efforts to correct this whopper, the name America stuck -- especially after the legendary mapmaker Gerardus Mercator used it for his Atlas Novus -- and the Western Hemisphere would forever not be known as Christopheria, Columbia, That New Place, Over Yonder or any number of more appropriate monikers.
What is beyond dispute is that Vespucci was the first person to confirm that his rival Christopher Columbus had discovered a fourth land mass (Europe, Asia and Africa being the others) as a result of two voyages he made to the east coast of South America in 1499 and 1502. Everything else -- and I mean literally everything else -- associated with or attributed to Vespucci simply cannot be confirmed as the gospel truth.
Vespucci almost certainly was not behind the Soderini Letter but did not dispute it, and he was an extraordinary piece of work in his own right as is made vividly clear in Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America, a brief and delightful biography by noted historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
Fernández-Armesto writes in the very first sentence that Vespucci was:
"[A] pimp in his youth and a magus in his maturity. This astonishing transformation was part of his relentless self-reinvention, from which sprang a dazzling succession of career moves and what the celebrity press now calls makeovers."Vespucci was born in 1454 in Florence, an improbable power center given that it was landlocked, had a river than ran dry in the summer and was run by greedy oligarchs. But these oligarchs thought highly of their abilities -- and most highly of money and not their ancestry -- and Florence became a great international trading state and center for the arts.
He first worked for the great Lorenzo de' Medici, the point man for the Golden Age of Florence, and his brother, Giovanni, who sent him to work at their agency in another improbable power center, Seville, where the young man showed himself to be marginally competent at his assignments but through dumb luck toiled there just as Columbus was mounting his first voyage.
Vespucci reinvented himself as an expedition outfitter, at which he was not half bad, and then decided to try the voyage thing himself.
Although he never was a ship's captain or even a pilot despite his claims to the contray, he became adept at using an astrolabe (small photo) and other astronomical devices on his own two voyages of discovery, which he was to variously claim as three or four voyages in what little written record is attributed to him. As it is, that record includes barely disguised plagiarizing of Columbus's writings, and his great boast of finding a new continent (South America) was merely a confirmation of what Columbus himself already had ascertained. He could not even claim the term "New World" as his own; Peter Martyr already had done so.
Writes Fernández-Armesto:
"If we focus determinedly on Vespucci's reasons for espousing a new vocation as an explorer, we run the risk of overestimating his agency. We change direction in life not always because we want to, but because we have to, or because we respond to new opportunities as a way of escaping from existing constraints. . . . The chance came because of Columbus. . . . But, as so often, he was driven and drawn by circumstances into a new way of life like a mariner tacking against adversity who finds himself borne away by a sudden change in the wind."While Vespucci was a permanent makeover candidate who always made risky career moves, others like the author of the Soderini Letter helped him along nicely:
"The Letter was the first stage in the making of a legend. Most noteworthy historical figures live on in a long series of fictionalizations; a few have the privilege of launching the process themselves. Once launched, the process is uncontrollable. In the mid-seventeenth century, Girolamo Bartolomei Smeducci dedicated to Louis IV a poem, replete with allegory about Vespucci. The explorer becomes a symbolic traveler who goes all over the world but is bound for heaven. Much of his time is spent in Africa, where the devil rules a land 'blackened by his vices.' Amerigo crosses boreal seas and ranges over the Pacific and Indian oceans. But his pilgrimage is a spiritual one. He seeks Truth. It is hard to think of more inappropriate casting for the shifty ex-spiv."Ralph Waldo Emerson famously called Vespucci a mere "pickle dealer," and in the end Fernández-Armesto says this second-rate explorer and third-rate plagiarist was like a character in the Ship of Fools, a literary conceit of the time, and quotes from Alsatian satirist Sebastian Brant's famous poem of that name:
I do not deem him very wise
Who energetically tries
To probe all cities, every land,
And takes the circle well in hand
That thereby he may well decide
How broad the Earth, how long and wide . . .
What men live here, what men live there,
If underneath our feet below
Men walk the nether earth or no,
And how they hold their ground down there,
That they fall not into the air,
And how with rule and compass you
May cut the whole great world in two.
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