OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 299 



igatlon, has exercised an important influence on the political 

 institutions, the ideas and feelings of those nations who occu- 



iiudience took place in the year 1496, and even that America was dis 

 covered in 1491. Gomara had the same printed, not in numerals, but 

 in words, and placed the discovery of the tierra jirme of America in 

 1497, in the very year, therefore, which proved so fatal to Amerigo 

 Vespucci's reputation. {Examen Crit., t. v., p. 196-202.) The wholly 

 irreproachable conduct of the Florentine (who never attempted to at- 

 tach his name to the New Continent, but who, in the grandiloquent 

 accounts which he addressed to the Gonfalionere Piero Goderini, to 

 Pierfrancesco de' Medici, and to Duke Ren6 II. of Lorraine, had the 

 misfortune of drawing upon himself the attention of posterity more 

 than he deserved) is most positively proved by the lawsuit which the 

 fiscal authorities carried on from 1508 to 1527 against the heirs of Chris- 

 topher Columbus, for the purpose of withdrawing from them the rights 

 and privileges which had been granted by the crown to the admiral in 

 1492. Amerigo entered the service of the state as Piloto mayor in the 

 same year that the lawsuit began. He lived at Seville during four 

 years of this suit, in which it was to be decided what parts of the New 

 Continent had been first reached by Columbus. The most miserable 

 reports found a hearing, and were converted into subjects of accusation 

 by the fiscal ; witnesses were sought for at St. Domingo, and all the 

 Spanish ports, at Moguer, Palos, and Seville, and even under the eyes 

 of Amerigo Vespucci and his nephew Juan. The Mundus Novus, print- 

 ed by Johann Otmer, at Augsburg, in 1504 ; the Raccolta di Vicenza 

 (^Mondo Novo e paesi novamente retrovati da Alberico Vespuzio Fioren- 

 tino), by Alessandro Zorzi/'in 1507, and generally ascribed to Fracan- 

 zio di Montalboddo ; and the Quatuor Navigationes of Martin Waldsee- 

 miiller (Hylacomylus), had already appeared. Since 1520, maps had 

 been constructed, on which w^as marked the name of America, which 

 had been proposed by Hylacomylus in 1507, and praised by Joachim 

 Vadius in a letter addressed to Rudolphus Agricola from Vienna in 1512 ; 

 and yet the person to whom widely-circulated writings in Germany, 

 France, and Italy attributed a voyage of discoveiy in 1497, to the tier- 

 ra Jirme of Paria, was neither cited by the fiscal as a witness in the 

 lawsuit which had been begun in 1508, and was continued during 

 nineteen years, nor was he even spoken of as the predecessor or the 

 opponent of Columbus. Why, after the death of Amerigo Vespucci 

 (22d February, 1512, in Seville), was not his nephew, Juan Vespucci» 

 called upon to show (as Martin Alonso, Vicente Yanez Pinzon, Juan de 

 la Cosa, and Alonso de Hqjeda had done) that the coast of Paria, which 

 did not derive its importance from its being " part of the main land of 

 Asia," but on account of the productive pearl fishery in its vicinity, 

 had been already reached by Amerigo, before Columbus landed there 

 on the 1st of August, 1498 ? The disregard of this most important test- 

 imony is inexplicable if Amerigo Vespucci had ever boasted of having 

 made a voyage of discovery in 1497, or if any serious import hnd been 

 attached at that time to the confused dates and mistakes in the printing 

 of the " Quatuor Navigationes.^^ The great and still unprinted work 

 of a friend of Columbus, Fra Bartholome de las Casas (the Historia 

 general de las Indias), was written, as we know with certainty, at 

 very different periods. It was not begun until fifteen years after the 

 death of Amerigo in 1527, and was finished in 1559, seven years be- 

 fore the death of the aged author, in his 92d year. Praise and bitter 



