Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  The authorities in Santo Domingo were predictably furious, but, as the experts pointed out, there were so few bones involved, and the tomb had been moved so often, that there was no reason why both cathedrals should not actually house some of the remains of the great explorer.

  9

  THE NEW WORLD

  “There are three stages in the popular attitude towards a great discovery: first, men doubt its existence; next they deny its importance; and finally they give the credit to somebody else.”

  ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

  “Had our father Adam made them his sole heirs?”

  FRANCIS I, King of France, complaining

  about the Treaty of Tordesillas,

  dividing the world between

  the Portuguese and Spanish

  IN THE SMALL town of Saint-Dié in April 1507, in the disputed territory between France and Burgundy, and in the home of a local intellectual, Gaultier Lud, one of the most important maps ever printed was taking shape. Columbus had been dead for less than a year. Pope Julius had just announced his notorious indulgence to pay for the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and Leonardo da Vinci was back in Milan, finishing the Virgin of the Rocks. Here in the Vosges mountains, a thirty-three-year-old German printer called Martin Waldseemüller was just pulling from the press the first proof of a section of his new world map. There was the potent smell of ink.*

  These were the great days of printing. It was only half a century since Johannes Gutenberg had first set type in a way that could be rapidly and widely reproduced, and already there were 10 million printed books in circulation in Europe, in 27,000 different editions. Aldus Manutius had founded his famous press in Venice only fifteen years before, and now there were novels and compendiums of knowledge, from ancient to downright dangerous, throughout the continent, spreading the ideas of the Renaissance outside Italy, and the methods of business far beyond the great banking and trading cities. In every university town, and many other places, the presses were at work, with their ink warming on the stove and the clicking sound of assistants setting up the type, before the great presses began to turn out more pages—each one precisely the same as the last.

  A thousand copies of the Saint-Dié map were to be printed in twelve large sheets, designed to be attached on a wood support to make up a plan of the world just under ninety-five-inches wide. It was a thrilling moment for Waldseemüller and his colleagues, and the printing assistants they had brought in from Strasbourg and Basel to help, all of them clustered around the press. They believed this was the most accurate representation of the world ever produced, it showed a clear gap between the New World and the Far East—though the Pacific had not yet been seen by any European—and incorporated the discoveries of Columbus, da Gama, Cabral, Cabot, Vespucci, and their colleagues and competitors.

  Waldseemüller was a graduate of Freiburg University in Germany and the son of a butcher, with a fascination for geography and a playful excitement about words and wordplay. He was one of the young scholars attracted to Saint-Dié by Duke René II of Lorraine, who was himself thrilled by the new geography. Lud was another of these. Later to be director-general of the duke’s mining operations, he had invested in a printing press back in 1494 and set it up in his home.

  Lud had a dream. He was going to lead a project to publish a new printed edition of Ptolemy’s Geography and had recruited a number of young scholars to help him. They met regularly at his home and called themselves the Gymnase Vosgien, a literary circle of the kind that was now flourishing in German cities. It included a young mathematician and poet from Heidelberg named Matthias Ringmann, who was recruited to do the new translation of Ptolemy, just as Waldseemüller was asked to organize the printing.

  Waldseemüller was particularly excited because of the possibilities of naming things. His own Latin tag, coined by himself and used for this map, was “Hylacomylus.” With the enthusiastic encouragement of his colleagues, he believed he had finally given credit where it was due on this new map. On the top are two figures presiding over the world: Ptolemy and Amerigo Vespucci. And on the left, marking the southern part of the new continent, is the name America. It is the first time, as far as anyone knows, that the word had been coined.

  How was it, then, that it was a version of Vespucci’s name—albeit his first name—that came to be on the map? The arguments have resounded ever since, and will probably never be resolved, but it was a series of accidents—made possible by the phenomenal growth of printing—that seems to have given America its name.

  What had happened was that Vespucci’s former Popolano employer had died in June 1503. He had been immensely proud of the letters that Vespucci had sent him, and showed them to visitors, or indeed anyone that asked. Many of the paragraphs were copied and passed around. When Lorenzo died the letters suddenly became the property of his executors. It was clear to them that these letters were of value, not just the ones that have survived but the fragments of others that circulated along with them. Somebody in their circle—calling themselves Jocundus—believed these should have a wider audience, and gathered as many fragments as he could with a new text that held the various genuine clips together in some kind of order. These were published later that same year, immediately after Lorenzo’s death and only shortly after Vespucci’s return from Latin America, and given the compelling title Mundus Novus, or New World.

  “We may rightly call them a New World,” writes Vespucci of the places he had visited, “because our ancestors had no knowledge of them and it will be a matter wholly new to those who hear about them.”

  Mundus Novus was an immediate success way beyond Florence. In its first two years, it ran to twenty-three editions and was immediately translated into a range of different languages. It was short and concise, and even if it was a little disjointed, it gave the impression of the intelligence behind it. Although Vespucci had not written it himself, it had clearly been constructed by someone with access to at least some of his letters—though probably not the major ones, which didn’t come to light until the eighteenth century. The book did more than anything else to spread the news throughout Europe that there was a New World, and its very existence became linked irrevocably with the author’s name.

  The success of Mundus Novus did not go unnoticed in Florence, and it occurred to one of Florence’s new printers that a longer book might sell profitably. There were no more letters forthcoming, so they employed a hack writer to construct one for them. This was the genesis of the book that would gild and then undermine Vespucci’s reputation around Europe. The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci was published partly as a simple matter of making a profit and partly about lampooning Vespucci himself among the skeptical reading public of Florence, for whom he had become a distant figure of some pomposity, suspiciously supplicatory to the old Medici regime.

  Not only was Vespucci a devoted servant of both branches of the Medici family, by then derided in most corners of Florence, but he was already engaged in an angry correspondence with critics back home who doubted aspects of his claims. He was furiously, and rather pompously, sending ammunition to his uncle Giorgio to use on his behalf (“And if any invidious and malign person refuses to believe it, let him come to me and I will declare it to him, with authority and with testimonies”). The Four Voyages was written as if it was another letter, but to someone it was absolutely inconceivable that he would ever have written to: the city’s new gonfalconier, the representative of the republic, Piero Soderini, who Vespucci had known and disliked at school.

  Soderini’s main accomplishment to date, apart from hanging on to his position, was to lure Michelangelo back to Florence in 1500 and point him in the direction of a large lump of marble in the cathedral workshop, which had been abandoned forty years before. The result was the extraordinary seventeen-foot-tall statue of David, which has become a symbol of the city’s pride. An entire wall of the cathedral compound needed to be demolished to get it out. The idea that the pawn of the Medicis, remembered as a
servant to aristocratic absolutism, might write to the leading figure of the new republic—who he was known to dislike—made the Florentines laugh.

  The Waldseemüller map

  The author used information from Mundus Novus for the two voyages, but he added two more voyages of his own, one in 1497 to Florida, which would have given Vespucci a claim to being the first navigator to find the mainland of America the same year as Cabot, and another to Brazil in 1503. The so-called Soderini letter was published in Florence in September 1504, just as Columbus was setting sail for home having been rescued from Jamaica. It was an immediate success in its home city and was soon carried to other places, where the jokes at Vespucci’s expense were less obvious. It may not have sold as well as Mundus Novus, but The Four Voyages had cannibalism, sex, and the thrilling hope of a cure for impotence, contained in the news that the women of the New World used herbs to stimulate their menfolk to prodigious sexual feats.

  The letter also caricatured Vespucci’s coy and slightly lascivious habit of drawing a polite veil over anything he considered improper. In the Soderini letter, this is taken to ludicrous lengths.

  They do not employ the custom of marriage. Each one takes the women he wants and when he repudiates them he does so without constituting an offence or shame for the women, for in this the women are as free as the men. They are not very jealous, but they are lascivious . . . and the women much more so than the men . . . they showed a great desire to have carnal knowledge with us Christians.

  Then, having titillated the readers, Vespucci is made to say that “out of decency, I refrain from telling of the expedients they employ to satisfy their inordinate lust.”

  Offered their wives and daughters as a sign of friendship, the author had Vespucci drawing the veil once more: “It would be out of the question for me to tell you all the honor they did us.” The readers in Florence must have laughed at so cruel a lampoon, almost as much as they enjoyed the mental pictures. The sexual gratification of explorers is little studied. Even now, we have to read between the lines, but it was clear that for the contemporary audiences, almost as much as the crews themselves, sex was one of the enjoyable aspects of discovery that was not generally written into the reports of the captains.

  The letter had a particularly damaging influence on European attitudes toward the people of the New World. On one occasion it described how a posse of native women killed a young crewman, cutting him up, roasting, and eating him before the horrified eyes of the crew. This horrific cannibal scene was depicted over and over again in drawings on the maps in generations to come. Something about it deeply impressed those who read it. The passage did almost as much as Vespucci’s noble savage descriptions to fix in the minds of Europe this sense of the “other” across the Atlantic, although Vespucci made it clear enough in other letters that he was staying with people who ate their enemies. Cannibalism, or tales of cannibalism, were used for centuries to justify the most brutal treatment of those who lived in Latin America before Columbus. Soon European pictures of demons were being modeled on Vespucci’s cannibals, and the noble savage had come full circle.

  The Four Voyages was full of inaccuracies, grammatical errors, and pretend Spanish words, to imply that Vespucci had been so long abroad he was almost foreign. It made him out to be boastful and dishonest about and reveling in his expatriate status. The whole production implied a comment on his perceived snobbery. Even so, the humor that had been aimed at Florence was lost on the rest of Europe, and the letter was not recognized as a forgery until 1879.

  While The Four Voyages was circulating around Europe, a copy of Mundus Novus had made its way to Saint-Dié. Ringmann had been thrilled by the book, translated it again into Latin, and given it to his colleagues. When a copy of The Four Voyages fell into his hands soon afterward, he shared it with excitement as well. Waldseemüller had decided on the strength of this that they would write a short introduction to the map, to which Ringmann contributed a poem. In this introduction, also published in 1507, Waldseemüller set out clearly why he had named the new continent in the way he had.

  Now, really these parts [Europe, Africa and Asia] were more widely traveled, and another fourth part was discovered by Americus Vespuccius (as will be seen in the following pages), for which reason I do not see why anyone would rightly forbid calling it (after the discoverer Americus, a man of wisdom and ingenuity) “Amerige,” that is, the land of Americus or “America,” since both Europe and Asia are names derived from women. Its location and the customs of its people will be easily discerned from the four voyages of Americus which follow.

  This is not the only explanation of the name. It has been suggested that Waldseemüller was not coining a term, but trying to explain one he had already heard—either because the name was derived from Amerrique, a district of what is now Nicaragua, a local name, or because Cabot called it after his patron Richard Amerike. But none of these explains the process of how the name reached Saint-Dié. Waldseemüller also removed the name in later editions, which implies that he did invent it. So this remains the best explanation so far.

  Having finished the first edition of the map, the Gymnase went back to preparing the edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. But it was a long struggle. Ringmann died of tuberculosis in 1511, and Lud ran into financial difficulties, and the project was taken on by two Strasbourg lawyers. But the Geography appeared in 1513 and was a great success. Waldseemüller himself realized by then that he had been mistaken about Vespucci and had failed to give enough credit to Columbus. His second edition of the famous map removed the name America and replaced it with Terra Incognita, but the name had a popular a ring to it, which seems to have been the main reason why he had coined it in the first place.*

  Meanwhile, other forgeries were circulating around Europe describing increasingly bizarre voyages by Vespucci, including one he was supposed to have undertaken to India in 1505, the year he was making Columbus’s case at Ferdinand’s court. There is no evidence that Vespucci ever claimed the name America. When his nephew Giovanni drew up an innovative world map in 1526, he didn’t call the continent anything at all.

  Nor is there any record the other way: of Vespucci complaining that a continent had been named after him. Equally there is no record that the map reached Seville in his lifetime. Nor, in fact, did Mundus Novus circulate much there either. As for The Four Voyages, he must have known about its publication, and cringed when he read its caricature of his pomposity, but it was never widely known in Spain. As a good Florentine, he knew it was a joke directed primarily at himself and he assumed that the rest of Europe knew it was intended as such. Unfortunately for his later reputation, the letters were taken at face value. The first generation was thrilled by them but after that the grotesque voice in which the Soderini letter was written—and the obvious inaccuracies—were attributed to Vespucci himself.

  The main reason it was assumed around Europe that Vespucci was somehow responsible for discovering America was the book title Mundus Novus. Actually, the term “New World” had been coined as early as 1493. The words “the New World” were first attributed to Vespucci, though in Mundus Novus, which, while not actually written by him, was largely culled from his letters to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco.

  But it is not clear that Vespucci was the first to recognize what they had all discovered on the other side of the Atlantic. By the time his books were published, most educated opinion in Castile agreed that Columbus had probably not discovered the Indies, even though the pope was still talking about it as part of Asia. But even Columbus recognized, as early as his third voyage, that he was sailing alongside a new continent. He was just mistaken about where it was. He clung to the idea that it was just south of China rather than a long way east of it. What Vespucci did was to add considerably to people’s understanding. After his own second voyage from 1501 to 1502, down the eastern coast of Latin America, the problem was clear for the policy makers of Europe: how to get through this landmass to the Indies, either north of the
new continent, or south of it—or possibly, as Columbus hoped to the end, through an undiscovered passage in the middle.

  But the critical factor in the naming of America after Vespucci rather than Columbus was simply the enormous growth in printing and literacy over the previous generation. Columbus’s letters about his discoveries had been published and printed, but they just referred to the Indies. It was a new route he was claiming, not a new continent. Nor did they carry the whiff of erotic adventure that Vespucci’s forgeries claimed. Columbus’s writings were vivid but included a tone of self-justification that undermined their potential for bestseller status. When a book called The Ship of Fools was published in 1494, describing new countries filled with gold discovered by Castilians, it included no mention of Columbus at all.

  If Columbus had remained obsessed with a passage through Central America to China, and the Bristol rivals were obsessed with a Northwest Passage, Vespucci was now driven by the hope of going farther than his last voyage and finding a southwest passage to Asia. He spent Columbus’s last months in Seville, preparing the case for a new voyage. Together with Vicente Yáñez Pinzón and Juan de la Cosa, Vespucci had persuaded Ferdinand to invest in their planned expedition and, just as Columbus was failing, they were busy fitting out three ships for the journey. But the preparations were taking place while the uncertainty about who should succeed Isabella to the throne of Castile was rumbling away in the background, during Ferdinand’s long wait for the arrival of his daughter Juana and her husband, Philip of Burgundy.