THE NAME AMERICA. 669 



upou them, he wrote Tierra di Amerriques, and that Jean Basin and 

 others made the mistake which led Schoener to make the accusation. 

 I believe that there is no reasonable doubt that there was some sort of 

 shrewd underhand practice by some one in the whole matter of the 

 attribution of the discovery of the New World to Ves'pucci, and in the 

 maintenance of the name Americ as his Christian name, when it is 

 Amerigho. Without going so far as to regard Vesi)ucci as an im- 

 postor, it is difficult not to admit that he was a great diplomatist, what 

 we call now a shrewd politician, a tail fino in Italian, and that there 

 are reasons enough to consider him as a sort of mystificator. 



COLOMBO AND VESPUCCI. 



Cristoforo Colombo has the honesty and simplicity of a seaman who 

 has passed all his life before the mast; believing easily that others were 

 " bombredebien," if they had the reputation of being honest merchants. 

 Amerigho Vespucci has been during the greatest part of his life a 

 " fiorentino merchante," as he called himself, educated for the trade at 

 Florence and accustomed to all the little underhand ways of traders. 

 He was considered at Sevilla as an " hombre de bien " in trade, and 

 his failure of success as a merchant confirms that view to a certain 

 extent. 



Unfortunate in his speculations, he took at the end of his life to sea- 

 manship, as an astronomer, chart maker, captain, and pilot, and finally 

 he was appointed piloto major. He never had command of a single 

 expedition, and was after all a very secondary man in Spain or Portugal 

 where there were such great navigators as Colombo, Vasco de Gama, 

 Pinson, de la Cosa, Hojeda, Pedro de Ledesma, de Solis, Juan and Se- 

 bastiano Caboto, Diego de Lepe, the Cortereal, Cabral, de Bastidos, 

 Vergara, Coelho, etc. 



But it is evident that ambition to be known as a great discoverer 

 and a navigator of renown took hold of Vespucci, soon after entering 

 into his new life ; and he addressed his voyages to the King of Spain, 

 the King of Portugal, a Medicis in Paris, the perpetual gonfalonier of 

 Florence, and finally to the good Rene, King of Sicily and Due of 

 Lorraine. The style of Vespucci is rather diffuse and pretentious, "it 

 vise a Vefet,^ according to de Humboldt. He leans constantly towards 

 exaggeration, and boasts of having received patent letters from the 

 King of Portugal. The most exhaustive researches into the books, 

 which are all preserved in the archives of the Torre do Tombo, contain- 

 ing all the patent letters delivered by the kings of Portugal, have 

 failed entirely to show any trace of these ; and even the name of Ves- 

 pucci has never been found in a single document in Portugal. 



Everything pertaining to Vespucci, as a traveller and a navigator, must 

 be received with some apprehension that it is either much exaggerated 

 or even untrue. We must remember that Vespucci was a Florentine, 

 a friend of a Medicis and of Soderiui 5 a trader until forty-eight years 



