Amerigo Vespucci
Amerigo Vespucci
b. 1454 Florence, Italy
d. 1512 Seville, Spain
Although he claimed it was 1497 when he made the first of four voyages to the
land that was subsequently
(in the end) named
for him, Vespucci very likely spent most of that year in
Spain.
After all, the commercial house he ran was feverishly busy fitting out
(supplying)
the ships for
Columbus'
third voyage, and those preparations lasted into May of 1498. That makes it
improbable (not very likely),
if not downright impossible, that Vespucci reached the shores of the
South American
continent in June 1497 as
he insisted he did - that is, even before
Columbus
got there. The second and third voyages that Vespucci called his own do seem
completely legitimate (truthful and possible);
the fourth, however, seems as fanciful (untrue)
as the first. On none of them was he - nor, to his credit, did he claim to be
- the navigator in charge.
What, then, can possibly be the justification
(reason) for
naming two continents after a man whose exploits
(voyages)
were at least in part invented and who was wholly prone to showmanship -
whose accounts were written for the express purpose of making himself a
household name? It can only be explained as one of the great flukes
(accidents) of history. On
the strength of Vespucci's own descriptions of his feats, a German mapmaker
named
Martin Waldseemuller
created a map on which
he placed the name "America" on the large southern continent
(the extension of the name to the northern
continent would come later).
We can speculate (guess)
that
Waldseemuller
was reading too quickly and didn't grasp (fully understand) just
what
Columbus'
role had been in all this - or that, in a burst of misplaced enthusiasm, he
decided to celebrate Vespucci for declaring once and for all that these new
lands were not part of
Asia.
In any case, he subsequently (later)
tried to assign the credit where it belonged-to
Columbus-but
it was too late. The name "America" had stuck.
For all this, Vespucci's contributions were genuine and considerable, at least
in the area of nautical science. The system he created for determining
longitude proved very nearly exact. And, at a time when most Europeans thought
Asia
to be as short a trip across the
Atlantic
as the Americas turned out to be, Vespucci calculated the circumference of the
earth and was off by only 50 miles. Whereas
Columbus
could only guess at the true location and scope of what he called an "Other
World," Vespucci effectively established that two vast (very large)
continents lay between
Europe
and the east coast of
Asia.
Below are links and sites for more information on Amerigo
Vespucci.
This site was last updated
08/04/2004 08:08 PM -0400
