?98 COSMOS. 



brought nearer to Europe during the last half century, by 

 means of commercial intercourse and the improvement of nav- 



dian edition of Mela, and represented, like more modern Chinese maps, 

 ihe lotlimus of Panama broken through, had appeared two years ear- 

 lier. {Examen Crit., t. iv., p. 99-124; t. v., p. 168-176.) It is a great 

 error to regard the map of 1527, obtained from the Ebner library at 

 Nuremberg, now in Weimar, and the map of 1529 of Diego Ribero, 

 ■which ditiers from the former, and is engraved by Gussefeld, as tlie 

 oldest maps of the New Continent (op. cit., t. ii., p. 184 ; t. iii., p. 191). 

 Vespucci had visited the coasts of South America in the expedition of 

 Alonso de Hojeda, a year after the third voyage of Columbus, in 1499, 

 in company with Juan de la Cosa, whose map, drawn at Puerto de 

 Santa Maria in 1500, fully six years before Columbus's death, was first 

 made known by myself. Vespucci could not have had any motive for 

 feigning a voyage in the year 1497, for he, as well as Columbus, was 

 firmly persuaded, until his death, that only parts of Eastern Asia had 

 been reached. (Compare the letter of Columbus, February, 1502, to 

 Pope Alexander VIL, and another, July, 1506, to Queen Isabella, in 

 Navarrete, t. i., p. 304 ; t. ii., p. 280 ; and Vespucci's letter to Pierfran- 

 cesco de' Medici, in Bandini's Vita e Leltere di Amerigo Vespucci, p. 66 

 and 83.) Pedro de Ledesma, the pilot of Columbus on his third voy- 

 age, says, even in 1513, in the lawsuit against the heirs, " that Paria is 

 regarded as a part of Asia, la tierra Jirme qne dicese que es de Asia.^' — 

 Navarrete, t. iii., p. 539. The frequent periphrases, Mondo nouvo, alter 

 Orbis, Colonus novit Orbis repertor, are not at variance with this, as 

 they only denote regions not before seen, and are so used by Strabo, 

 Mela, Tertullian, Isidore of Seville, and Cadamosto. (^Examen Crit.^ 

 t. i., p. 118; t. v., p. 182-184.) For more than twenty years after the 

 death of Vespucci, which occurred in 1512, and until the calumnious 

 charges of Schoner, in the Opnsculum Geographicum, 1533, and of 

 Servet, in the Lyons edition of Ptolemy's Geography of 1535, we find 

 no complaint against the Florentine navigator. Christopher Colum- 

 Dus, a year before his death, calls him mucho hombre de bien, a man of 

 worth, " worthy of all confidence," and " always inclined to render 

 bim service." {Carta a mi muy caro fijo D. Diego, in Navarrete, t. i., 

 p. 351.) Fernando Colon expresses the same good will toward Ves- 

 pucci. He wrote the life of his father in 1535, in Seville, four years 

 before his death, and with Juan Vespucci, a nephew of Amerigo's, at- 

 tended the astronomical junta of Badajoz, and the proceedings respect- 

 ing 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 

 every thing which can lessen the fame of Columbus ; by Ramusio ; and 

 by the great historian Guicciardini. If Amerigo had intentionally falsi- 

 fied the dates of his voyage, he would have brought them into agree 

 ment 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 confusions 

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

 printed in the sixteenth century. Oviedo had been present, as 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 thi* 



