Part 62 (2/2)

This Vespucian baptism of South America now easily worked its way to general recognition. It is found in a contemporary set of gores which Nordenskiold has of late brought to light, and was soon adopted by the Nuremberg globe-maker, Schoner (1515, etc.); by Vadia.n.u.s at Vienna, when editing Pomponius Mela (1515); by Apian on a map used in an edition of Solinus, edited by Camers (1520); and by Lorenz Friess, who had been of Duke Rene's coterie and a correspondent of Vespucius, on a map introduced into the Gruniger Ptolemy, published at Stra.s.sburg (1522), which also reproduced the Waldseemuller map of 1513. This is the earliest of the Ptolemies in which we find the name accepted on its maps.

[Sidenote: 1522. The name first in a Ptolemy.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NORDENSKIoLD GORES.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: APIa.n.u.s, 1520.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCHoNER GLOBE, 1515.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRIESS (_Frisius_), IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1522.]

There is one significant fact concerning the conflict of the Crown with the heirs of Columbus, which followed upon the Admiral's death, and in which the advocates of the government sought to prove that the claim of Columbus to have discovered the continental sh.o.r.e about the Gulf of Paria in 1498 was not to be sustained in view of visits by others at an earlier date. This significant fact is that Vespucius is not once mentioned during the litigation. It is of course possible, and perhaps probable, that it was for the interests of both parties to keep out of view a servant of Portugal trenching upon what was believed to be Spanish territories. The same impulse could hardly have influenced Ferdinand Columbus in the silent acquiescence which, as a contemporary informs us, was his att.i.tude towards the action of the St. Die professors. There seems little doubt of his acceptance of a view, then undoubtedly common, that there was no conflict of the claims of the respective navigators, because their different fields of exploration had not brought such claims in juxtaposition.

[Sidenote: Who first landed on the southern main?]

[Sidenote: Vespucius's maps.]

[Sidenote: Vespucius not privy to the naming.]

Following, however, upon the a.s.sertion of Waldseemuller, that Vespucius had ”found” this continental tract needing a name, there grew up a belief in some quarters, and deducible from the very obscure chronology of his narrative, which formulated itself in a statement that Vespucius had really been the first to set foot on any part of this extended main.

It was here that very soon the jealousy of those who had the good name of Columbus in their keeping began to manifest itself, and some time after 1527,--if we accept that year as the date of his beginning work on the _Historie_,--Las Casas, who had had some intimate relations with Columbus, tells us that the report was rife of Vespucius himself being privy to such pretensions. Unless Las Casas, or the reporters to whom he referred, had material of which no one now has knowledge, it is certain that there is no evidence connecting Vespucius with the St. Die proposition, and it is equally certain that evidence fails to establish beyond doubt the publication of any map bearing the name America while Vespucius lived. He had been made pilot major of Spain March 22, 1508, and had died February 22, 1512. We have no chart made by Vespucius himself, though it is known that in 1518 such a chart was in the possession of Ferdinand, brother of Charles the Fifth. The recovery of this chart would doubtless render a signal service in illuminating this and other questions of early American cartography. It might show us how far, if at all, Vespucius ”sinfully failed towards the Admiral,” as Las Casas reports of him, and adds: ”If Vespucius purposely gave currency to this belief of his first setting foot on the main, it was a great wickedness; and if it was not done intentionally, it looks like it.”

With all this predisposition, however, towards an implication of Vespucius, Las Casas was cautious enough to consider that, after all, it may have been the St. Die coterie who were alone responsible for starting the rumor.

[Sidenote: ”America” not used in Spain.]

[Sidenote: 1541. Mercator first applied the name to both North and South America.]

It is very clear that in Spain there had been no recognition of the name ”America,” nor was it ever officially recognized by the Spanish government. Las Casas understood that it had been applied by ”foreigners,” who had, as he says, ”called America what ought to be called Columba.” Just what date should attach to this protest of Las Casas is not determinable. If it was later than the gore-map of Mercator in 1541, which was the first, so far as is known, to apply the name to both North and South America, there is certainly good reason for the disquietude of Las Casas. If it was before that, it was because, with the progress of discovery, it had become more and more clear that all parts of the new regions were component parts of an absolutely new continent, upon which the name of the first discoverer of any part of it, main or insular, ought to have been bestowed. That it should be left to ”foreign writers,” as Las Casas said, to give a name representing a rival interest to a world that Spanish enterprise had made known was no less an indignity to Spain than to her great though adopted Admiral.

[Sidenote: Spread of the name in central Europe.]

It happens that the suggestion which sprang up in the Vosges worked steadily onward through the whole of central Europe. That it had so successful a propagation is owing, beyond a doubt, as much to the exclusive spirit of the Spanish government in keeping to itself its hydrographical progress as to any other cause. We have seen how the name spread through Germany and Austria. It was taken up by Stobnicza in Poland in 1512, in a Cracow introduction to Ptolemy; and many other of the geographical writers of central and southern Europe adopted the designation. The _New Interlude_, published in England in 1519, had used it, and towards the middle of the century the fame of Vespucius had occupied England, so far as Sir Thomas More and William Cunningham represent it, to the almost total obscuration of Columbus.

It was but a question of time when Vespucius would be charged with promoting his own glory by borrowing the plumes of Columbus. Whether Las Casas, in what has been quoted, initiated such accusations or not, the account of that writer was in ma.n.u.script and could have had but small currency.

[Sidenote: 1533. Schoner accuses Vespucius of partic.i.p.ation in the injustice.]

The first accusation in print, so far as has been discovered, came from the German geographer, Johann Schoner, who, having already in his earlier globes adopted the name America, now in a tract called _Opusculum Geographic.u.m_, which he printed at Nuremberg in 1533, openly charged Vespucius with attaching his own name to a region of India Superior. Two years later, Servetus, while he repeated in his Ptolemy of 1535 the earlier maps bearing the name America, entered in his text a protest against its use by alleging distinctly that Columbus was earlier than Vespucius in finding the new main.

Within a little more than a year from the death of Vespucius, and while the maps a.s.signed to Waldseemuller were pressed on the attention of scholars, the integralness of the great southern continent, to which a name commemorating Americus had been given, was made manifest, or at least probable, by the discovery of Balboa.

[Sidenote: A barrier suspected.]

Let us now see how the course of discovery was finding record during these early years of the sixteenth century in respect to the great but unsuspected barrier which actually interposed in the way of those who sought Asia over against Spain.

[Sidenote: Discoveries in the north.]

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