• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 711 0

Amerigo.” But it was not to be. The name “America” stuck to the continent, beginning with the huge, composite Universalis cosmographia, a printed wall map of the world by Martin Waldseemüller, published in April 1507, the same year that the cartographer made corresponding globe gores—flat, approximately triangular sections designed to wrap around a ball. This is the first map to include the name “America.” For it, Waldseemüller and his assistant, Matthias Ringmann, drew on several sources, including Columbus, for their depiction of the world at the height of the age of exploration, but they decided to award Vespucci preeminence. When it became apparent that Vespucci’s role had been vastly overstated, Waldseemüller revised his map and renamed parts of it Terra Incognita; by this time, about a thousand copies of the original had been distributed, too late to correct the misimpression.

Although he gave his name to the continent that Columbus visited before him, Amerigo Vespucci’s exploits did not obliterate his predecessor’s contribution. Columbus had made such a large impression on the events of his time, and was so well known, if not admired, that the name “America” does not summon the legacy of Vespucci, but the exploits of Columbus.

Amerigo Vespucci began his career not at sea but in finance, working for both Lorenzo de’ Medici and his son Giovanni. In the year Columbus made his first voyage, Vespucci had been detailed to the Medici bank in Seville. Cultivating Portuguese as well as Spanish connections, he received an invitation from King Manuel of Portugal to observe a number of voyages bound for South America between 1499 and 1500. One of them, led by Pedro Alvares Cabral, bound for the Cape of Good Hope and India, visited what is now Brazil in 1500. According to the terms of a modified Treaty of Tordesillas, Portugal was entitled to this land. Then, in a situation parallel to the one in which Columbus found himself with respect to the islands making up the Indies, the Portuguese king wished to learn if this newly discovered land, Brazil, was an island or part of the same continent that Columbus had already visited. Another voyage would be required to obtain the answer.

For now, Vespucci, despite his advanced age, benefited from his prestigious connections and arranged to sail with Ojeda’s fleet, “but I do not know whether as a pilot or as a man trained in navigation and learned in cosmography,” Las Casas confessed. “And even though Amerigo stresses that the king of Castile”—that is, Ferdinand—“put the fleet together, and that they went to discover at his command, it is not so.” Instead, a small group of investors “pestered the king and queen for a license to go discover and trade.” With the tremendous advantage of Columbus’s hard-won chart, his pilots, and sailors, Ojeda stood ready to capitalize on their hunger for empire. He knew about the “Indies,” and he even knew about Columbus’s much more recent discoveries of Paria, Trinidad, and the Dragon’s Mouth. Ojeda took care not to challenge Columbus’s claim to have visited the region first; he wanted to be among the subsequent visitors included in its bounty. Imitation was the shortest route to wealth.

As a competitor supported by the Spanish crown, Ojeda posed a graver threat to Columbus’s legitimacy than the scheming Francisco Roldán. Believing that Columbus could be assailed with impunity, Ojeda resorted to causing “all other mischief he could,” including spreading a false rumor that Queen Isabella “was at death’s door and that on her death the Admiral would be without a protector.” At that point, Ojeda “could do what injury he pleased to the Admiral.”

Treasonous sentiments like these were calculated to inflame Columbus’s old adversary Roldán. To Ojeda’s dismay, Roldán, having made peace with the Admiral, gathered a force of twenty-six men to pursue their new common enemy, Ojeda, who had taken up residence in an Indian village in Hispaniola. Energized, Roldán searched for his prey by night, but word of his mission reached Ojeda, who came out to confront his