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Updated: June 22, 2025
It may be that Penn has been betimes a little overrated. He has, and deserves, a high place in the history of our commonwealth, but he was not the real founder of it; for its foundations were laid years before he was born and more than forty years before he received his charter. He founded Pennsylvania only as Americus Vespucius discovered America.
It will be seen in the first section of this chapter, that Americus dates his first voyage two years earlier; obviously to warrant his pretended discovery of the coast of Paria, which Columbus had actually discovered in July or August 1498.
Many tribes came to see us, and wondered at our faces and our whiteness: and they asked us whence we came: and we gave them to understand that we had come from heaven, and that we were going to see the world, and they believed it. Americus Vespucius was born in Florence in 1452 and died in Seville in 1512.
The admiral had but just left San-Lucar on his third voyage, when four expeditions of discovery were fitted out almost at the same moment, at the cost of some rich ship-owners, foremost among whom we find the Pinzons and Americus Vespucius. The first of these expeditions, which left the port of Santa-Maria on the 20th of May, 1499, consisted of four vessels, and was commanded by Alonzo Hojeda.
A few of them had seen the vessels of Americus Vespucius and Cabral. The rumour of the white men and their floating castle had been wafted far and wide along the coast and into the interior of Brazil, and with breathless wonder the natives had listened to the strange account. But now the vision was before them in reality.
Americo Vespucci, whom we call Americus Vespusius, a merchant of Florence, had the honour of giving his name to this new half of the globe, in which he did not possess one acre of land, and pretended to be the first who discovered the continent.
I remember that's what our old minister in Ohio said once. He was a real nice old man; and they HAD thought everything of him in the parish; but he got old and his sermons were long; and so they got a young man for assistant; and they made HIM a pastor americus, they called it some sort of Latin.
I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespueius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.
And fiue yeeres after Americus went thither by the commandement of the king of Castile, and gaue vnto it his owne name, whereupon afterward it was called America. This man was very well seene in the Arte of Nauigation and in Astronomie: whereby hee discouered in his time many lands vnknowen vnto the ancient Geographers. This countrey is named by some, the land of Brasil, and the lande of Parots.
It is often impossible to ascertain, as here, from the equivocal language of the original, whether the author intends to express the course of the voyage or the direction of the wind. The course of the voyage from Cadiz to the Cananaries, whither Americus was now bound, certainly was towards the direction expressed in the text, and to this course the wind indicated is adverse.
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