United States or Saint Barthélemy ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The other book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been before me, and I could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered glory.
He was a young man of twenty when Columbus first touched the continent named after the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who made his voyages to it in the years 1499-1503. More wrote his Utopia when imaginations of men were stirred by the sudden enlargement of their conceptions of the world, and Amerigo Vespucci's account of his voyages, first printed in 1507, was fresh in every scholar's mind.
This pirated account, written in Hennepin's picturesque style, met with great success in Europe and was translated into several languages. We are reminded of the sensation which was made by Amerigo Vespucci's fanciful tales of the New World. One more question. If Hennepin lied in saying that he descended the Great River, how do we know that he really ascended it?
More learns from a sailor, one of Amerigo Vespucci's companions, of a wonderful Kingdom of Nowhere, in which all questions of labor, government, society, and religion have been easily settled by simple justice and common sense.
By a mistake in the date in his account of his travels, Vespucci's name came to be given to the new continent, and it was then too late to alter it. He became a naturalized Spaniard and died in 1512. Columbus indeed suffers in Florence; for had it not been for Vespucci, America would no doubt be called Columbia; while Brunelleschi anticipated him in the egg trick.
Since it had to be so, let us be thankful that it was Vespucci's first name which was selected, and not his last one. Meanwhile, the Spaniards had pushed their way across the Caribbean and explored the shores of the gulf, finding at last in Mexico a land of gold.
In 1511 a copy of Vespucci's narrative of his voyage had been lent to the monastery, and had been read with great interest. A grave question arose whether the new races discovered in the West were to be accounted as saved or damned.
"Cosmographies Introductio a description of the New World." "We shall at last get information about these fables of Columbus." "Columbus will not travel any more." "Columbus has travelled to hell! Now it is Amerigo Vespucci's turn." "He is a Florentine and a fellow-countrymen." "Well, Columbus was a Genoese." "Look you! Rome rules the world, the known and the unknown alike! Urbs est urbs!
And now we suddenly discovered something at once interesting and disconcerting an American flag floating from a tree in the background. "The place is rented, then," said Francesca, "to some enterprising American or some star-spangled Irishman who has succeeded in discovering Devorgilla before us. I well understand how the shade of Columbus must feel whenever Amerigo Vespucci's name is mentioned!"
He wrote a number of letters describing the voyages which he claimed to have made, and one of these was printed in a pamphlet which had a wide circulation, so that Vespucci's name came to be connected in the public mind with the new land in the west much more prominently than that of any other man.
Word Of The Day