Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 62

[Sidenote: Fame of Vespucius.]

We have a.s.sociated with Vespucius just the elements of such a success, while the fame of Columbus was waning to the death, namely: a stretch of continental coast, promising something more than the scattered trifles of an insalubrious archipelago; a new southern heavens, offering other glimpses of immensity; descriptions that were calculated to replace in new variety and mystery the stale stories of c.i.p.ango and Cathay: the busy yearnings of a group of young and ardent spirits, having all the apparatus of a press to apply to the making of a public sentiment; and the enthusiasm of narrators who sought to season their marvels of discovery with new delights and honors.

The hold which Vespucius had seized upon the imagination of Europe, and which doubtless served to give him prominence in the popular appreciation, as it has served many a ready and picturesque writer since, was that glowing redundancy of description, both of the earth and the southern constellations, which forms so conspicuous a feature of his narratives. It was the later voyage of Vespucius, and not his alleged voyage of 1497, which raised, as Humboldt has pointed out, the great interest which his name suggested.

[Sidenote: Columbus and Vespucius.]

Just what the notion prevailing at the time was of the respective exploits of Columbus and Vespucius is easily gathered from a letter dated May 20, 1506, which appears in a _Dyalogus Johannis Stamler de diversarum gencium sectis, et mundi regionibus_, published in 1508. In this treatise a reference is made to the letters of Columbus (1493) and Vespucius (1503) as concerning an insular and continental s.p.a.ce respectively. It speaks of "Cristofer Colom, the discoverer of _new islands_, and of Albericus Vespucius concerning the new discovered _world_, to both of whom our age is most largely indebted." It will be remembered that an early misnaming of Vespucius by calling him Albericus instead of Americus, which took place in one of the early editions of his narrative, remained for some time to confuse the copiers of them.

[Sidenote: Vespucius on gravitation.]

If we may judge from a diagram which Vespucius gives of a globe with two standing men on it ninety degrees apart, each dropping a line to the centre of the earth, this navigator had grasped, together with the idea of the sphericity of the globe, the essential conditions of gravitation.

There could be no up-hill sailing when the zenith was always overhead.

Curiously enough, the supposition of Columbus, when as he sailed on his third voyage he found the air grow colder, was that he was actually sailing up-hill, ascending a protuberance of the earth which was like the stem end of a pear, with the crowning region of the earthly paradise atop of all! Such contrasts show the lesser navigator to be the greater physicist, and they go not a small way in accounting for the levelness of head which gained the suffrages of the wise.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PART OF MAP IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1513.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PART OF MAP IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1513.]

[Sidenote: 1508. Duke Rene died.]

[Sidenote: 1509. _Globus Mundi._]

When Duke Rene, upon whom so much had depended in the little community at St. Die, died, in 1508, the geographical printing schemes of Waldseemuller and his fellows received a severe reverse, and for a few years we hear nothing more of the edition of Ptolemy which had been planned. The next year (1509), Waldseemuller, now putting his name to his little treatise, was forced, because of the failure of the college press, to go to Stra.s.sburg to have a new edition of it printed (1509).

The proposals for naming the continental discoveries of Vespucius seem not in the interim to have excited any question, and so they are repeated. We look in vain in the copy of this edition which Ferdinand Columbus bought at Venice in July, 1521, and which is preserved at Seville, for any marginal protest. The author of the _Historie_, how far soever Ferdinand may have been responsible for that book, is equally reticent. There was indeed no reason why he should take any exception.

The fitness of the appellation was accepted as in no way invalidating the claim of Columbus to discoveries farther to the north; and in another little tract, printed at the same time at Gruniger's Stra.s.sburg press, the anonymous _Globus Mundi_, the name "America" is adopted in the text, though the small bit of the new coast shown in its map is called by a translation of Vespucius's own designation merely "_Newe Welt_."

[Sidenote: 1513. The Stra.s.sburg Ptolemy.]

The Ptolemy scheme bore fruit at last, and at Stra.s.sburg, also, for here the edition whose maps are a.s.sociated with the name of Waldseemuller, and whose text shows some of the influence of a Greek ma.n.u.script of the old geographer which Ringmann had earlier brought from Italy, came out in 1513. Here was a chance, in a book far more sure to have influence than the little anonymous tract of 1507, to impress the new name America upon the world of scholars and observers, and the opportunity was not seized. It is not easy to divine the cause of such an omission. The edition has two maps which show this Vespucian continent in precisely the same way, though but one of them shows also to its full extent the region of Columbus's explorations. On one of these maps the southern regions have no designation whatever, and on the other, the "Admiral's map," there is a legend stretched across it, a.s.signing the discovery of the region to Columbus.

We do not know, in all the contemporary literature which has come down to us, that up to 1513 there had been any rebuke at the ignorance or temerity which appeared in its large bearing to be depriving Columbus of a rightful honor. That in 1509 Waldseemuller should have enforced the credit given to Vespucius, and in 1513 revoked it in favor of Columbus, seems to indicate qualms of conscience of which we have no other trace.

Perhaps, indeed, this reversion of sympathy is of itself an evidence that Waldseemuller had less to do with the edition than has been supposed. It is too much to a.s.sert that Waldseemuller repented of his haste, but the facts in one light would indicate it.

[Sidenote: The name America begins to be accepted.]

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

Like many such headlong projects, however, the purpose had pa.s.sed beyond the control of its promoters. The euphony, if not the fitness, of the name America had attracted attention, and there are several printed and ma.n.u.script globes and maps in existence which at an early date adopted that designation for the southern continent. Nordenskiold (_Facsimile Atlas_, p. 42) quotes from the commentaries of the German Coclaeus, contained in the _Meteorologia Aristotelis_ of Jacobus Faber (Nuremberg, 1512) a pa.s.sage referring to the "Nova Americi terra."

[Sidenote: 1516-17. First in a map.]

To complicate matters still more, within a few years after this an undated edition of Waldseemuller's tract appeared at Lyons,--perhaps without his partic.i.p.ation,--which was always found, down to 1881, without a map, though the copies known were very few; but in that year a copy with a map was discovered, now owned by an American collector, in which the proposition of the text is enforced with the name America on the representation of South America. A section of this map is here given as the Tross Gores. In the present condition of our knowledge of the matter, it was thus at a date somewhere about 1516-17 that the name appeared first in any printed map, unless, indeed, we allow a somewhat earlier date to two globes in the Hauslab collection at Vienna. On the date of these last objects there is, however, much difference of opinion, and one of them has been depicted and discussed in the _Mittheilungen_ of the Geographische Gesellschaft (1886, p. 364) of Vienna. Here, as in the descriptive texts, it must be clearly kept in mind, however, that no one at this date thought of applying the name to more than the land which Vespucius had found stretching south beyond the equator on the east side of South America, and which Balboa had shown to have a similar trend on the west. The islands and region to the north, which Columbus and Cabot had been the pioneers in discovering, still remained a mystery in their relations to Asia, and there was yet a long time to elapse before the truth should be manifest to all, that a similar expanse of ocean lay westerly at the north, as was shown by Balboa to extend in the same direction at the south.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HAUSLAB GLOBE.]

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.]