678 UOSMOS. 



and the improvement of navigation, has exercised an im- 



In Seville, four years before his death, and with Juan Vespucci, a nephew 

 of Amerigo's, attended the astronomical junta of Badajoz, and the pro- 

 ceedings respecting the possession of the Moluccas; similar feelings 

 were entertained by Petrus Martyr de Anghiera, the personal friend of 

 the admiral, whose correspondence goes down to 1525; by Oviedo, 

 who seeks for everything which can lessen the fame of Columbus; by 

 Ramusio; and by the great historian Guiccardini. If Amerigo had 

 intentionally falsified the dates of his voyages, he would have brought 

 them into agreement with each other, and not have made the first voyage 

 Terminate five months after the second began. The confusion of dates 

 in the many different translations of his voyages is not to be attributed 

 to him, as he did not himself publish any of these accounts. Such con- 

 fusions of figures were, besides, very frequently to be met with in 

 writings printed in the sixteenth century. Oviedo had been present, aa 

 one of the Queen's pages, at the audience at which Ferdinand and Isabella, 

 in 1493, received Columbus with much pomp on his return from his first 

 voyage of discovery. Oviedo has three times stated in print that thia 

 audience 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 tierrafirme of America in" 1497, 

 in the very year, therefore, which proved so fatal to Amerigo Vespucci's 

 reputation. (Examen crit. t. v. pp. 196-202.) The wholly irreproachable 

 conduct of the Florentine, (who never attempted to attach 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 Rene 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 Christopher 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 novu&, printed by Johann Otmer, at Augsburg, 

 in 1504; the Raccolta di Vicenza, (Mondo novo e paesi n&vamente 

 retrovati daAlberico Vespuzio Florentine,) by Aleesandro Zorzi, in 1507, 

 and generally ascribed to Fracanzio di Montalboddo; and the Quatuor 

 Navigations of Martin Waldsee-miiller (Hylacomylus) had already 

 appeared ; since 1520, maps had been constructed on which was marked 

 the name of America, which had been proposed by Hylacomylus in 1507, 

 and praised by Joachim Vadius in a letter addressed to Rude |>bus 



