We, who have followed the career of Amerigo Vespucci from its beginning to its ending, know that he was not a thief; that--except by implication, as having been a purveyor of naval stores--he was not a "pickle-dealer"; that he held a far higher rank than boatswain's mate--as attested by the royal proclamation we have cited, naming him to be chief pilot of Spain; and that, so far as the evidence of his contemporaries and his own letters show, he made no attempt whatever to thrust his personality upon the world.
He did not "baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name," though it is true that the appellation by which a hemisphere is known to-day was derived from Americus, Amerigo, or Americo--whether we speak it in Latin, in Italian, or in Spanish.
How comes it then, the reader may well ask, that America derived its name from the Florentine, Vespucci, when it should, by right of "discovery," have been called after the Genoese, Columbus? The answer to this question involves the following of clews centuries old, through a labyrinth of falsehood and misstatement that was built up three hundred years ago. The first clew may be found on page 197 of this biography, where mention is made of the translation of Vespucci's letter to Lorenzo de Medici, by Giocondo, in 1504, and issued by him under the title _Mundus Novus_. This letter is said to have been first published in Lisbon and Augsburg in 1504, and in Strasburg in 1505.
Pick up this book and nail it to the wall, where it may be observed by all, for it was the very beginning of Vespucci's posthumous troubles. We have read the letter and known it to have been a plain, unvarnished account of Vespucci's third voyage, in which he chanced to say that he thought he had discovered the fourth part of the globe, and proposed to call it _Mundus Novus_, or the New World. He was quite right, and within bounds, when he did this, for he was thinking only of that portion of the _southern hemisphere_ which he had found, and not of the entire western hemisphere. He did not extend the term to cover the northern regions, discovered by Columbus, for the latter had no idea that they pertained to a new world; in fact--as we know--believed to the last that they belonged to Asia or India.