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In perusing the works of Vespucci, Fernando Columbus, Geraldini, Oviedo, and Pietro Martyr, we recognize this tendency of the writers of the sixteenth century to find among the newly discovered nations all that the Greeks have related to us of the first age of the world, and of the manners of the barbarous Scythians and Africans.
Four hundred years ago and more, Amerigo Vespucci had sailed this unknown southern sea in his doughty caravel; he had wallowed and rocked for months over a course that the Doraine was asked to cover in the wink of an eye by comparison.
Da Gama, Vespucci, Balboa, Magellan, theirs were indeed names and deeds to set the heart of youth leaping, between its cradle and its twenty-fifth year. Holbein was twelve when Augsburg heard that England had a young king, whom it crowned as Henry VIII. He was setting out from his home, such as it was, to fight his own boyish battle of Life, when the news spread of Flodden's Field.
It was, says an old English writer, "abrode in every mannes handes." Amerigo's voyages led him chiefly to Central and South America and he became convinced that South America was a continent. So soon, what with the voyages of Vespucci and the voyages of other great men, it became at last quite certain that there was a vast continent beyond the Atlantic ocean.
There were four of them; but it was not the two learned doctors of law, Messer Guidantonio Vespucci and Messer Domenico Bonsi, that the crowd waited for; it was not Francesco Valori, popular as he had become in these late days.
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.
Vespucci, in his letter to Lorenzo de Medici, and also in that to Rene or Soderini, says, that his ships, after leaving the coast of Terra Firma, stopped at Hispaniola, where they remained about two months and a half, procuring provisions, during which time, he adds, "we had many perils and troubles with the very Christians who were in that island with Columbus, and I believe through envy."
The contractor for provisions was Jonato Berardi, a Florentine merchant settled at Seville; and, owing to his death, the contracting work fell upon his assistant Amerigo Vespucci, who was very actively employed on this service from April, 1497, to May, 1498.
Among the latter is Vespucci, nephew of Amerigo Vespucci of Florence who, at his death, bequeathed his knowledge of navigation and cosmography to his nephew. This young man has, in fact, been sent by the King as pilot to the flagship and commissioned to take the astronomical observations.
It would rather seem that his name was given to that part of the continent by others, as a tribute paid to his supposed merit, in consequence of having read his own account of his voyages. It is singular that Fernando, the son of Columbus, in his biography of his father, should bring no charge against Vespucci of endeavoring to supplant the admiral in this discovery.
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