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How the Discovery of Brazil Led to the Naming of America,  Part 2

4/13/2014

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PictureSouth American portion of Waldseemüller' s world map of 1507 with the first appearance of the name America.
Roger M. McCoy

We saw in Part 1 that Vespucci wrote a fantasized account of a voyage supposedly taken in 1497, in which he claimed to have discovered the mainland of a new massive continent. At that time it was still thought of as one very big continent. The key point was that Columbus did not touch the actual mainland until his third voyage in 1498—one year after Vespucci’s claim. 
Now we need to pick up the thread of the story with Vespucci’s account. 


They anchored a short distance north of the eastern bulge of Brazil (south of the present city of Fortaleza) with the intent of trading with some native people they could see near the shore. When two sailors went ashore with trade goods, the natives showed no interest in talking or dealing with them in any way. The men went off with the natives away from the shore and five days later there was still no sign of them. Then, a crowd of women and girls gathered on the beach and Coelho sent ashore the handsomest young sailor he had to talk with the women, hoping no doubt that he could charm them into returning the other two men. The women gathered around the young sailor with great interest, touching and feeling in a most suggestive way. Meanwhile, one strong woman came up behind the man and killed him with one blow to the head. The ladies then dragged the poor sailor by the feet to a nearby mound, roasted him over a fire, and ate chunks of his flesh within sight of the ship’s horrified crew.

As cover for the women’s festivities, native men appeared and shot volleys of arrows toward the ship as a defiant warning to leave them alone. Coelho had no interest in a battle at this time and ordered the ship to set sail. A few days later they met a friendlier tribe of people, three of whom volunteered(?) to go with the ship back to Portugal. Before returning to Portugal they sailed along much of the northeastern coast of Brazil, with Vespucci recording all that he saw. Vespucci was one of the few men of the period who wrote in great detail about the people, the flora and fauna. He showed a real appreciation for the local landscapes, and described everything thoroughly. In a letter to his former employer, Lorenzo de Medici, Vespucci provided the earliest reliable description of the landscape and natives of the coastal areas of Brazil. Two excerpts provide an example:

“This land is very delightful, and covered with an infinite number of green trees and very big ones which never lose their foliage, and throughout the year yield the sweetest aromatic perfumes and  produce an infinite variety of fruit grateful to the taste and healthful for the body.”

“The men are accustomed to bore holes in their lips and cheeks and in these holes they place bones and stones; and do not believe they are little. Most of them have at least three holes and some seven and some nine, in which they place stones of green and white alabaster, and which are as large as a Catalan plum, which seems unnatural; they say they do this to appear more ferocious; an infinitely brutal thing. Their marriages are not with one woman but with as many as they like, and without much ceremony.”

In describing their warlike quality, Vespucci wrote that he could not understand their inclination for war because they had no sense of ownership of land or any other wealth of possessions. He asked why they went to war, and learned that, “they wished to avenge the death of their ancestors” who at some time had been killed by men of another tribe. 

Following a battle, the victorious warriors buried their own dead, but gathered their dead enemies for a feast of human flesh. Prisoners from the enemy tribe, both male and female, were taken as slaves and required to marry within the tribe. This would enrich the gene pool a bit.  

When Coehlo and Vespucci returned to Portugal, the king expressed his disappointment with the voyage because they brought back no wealth of gold and silver. Only logwood, parrots, monkeys, and a few native people. Discovery of the real mineral wealth of Brazil came much later.

Vespucci sailed under Coelho’s seasoned command but regarded him as an inferior seaman. Vespucci’s writings described Coelho as “a very presumptuous and headstrong man,” and claimed that several ships of the venture were lost “all through the pride and folly of our admiral.” Vespucci shamelessly portrayed himself as the superior seaman, and praised himself frequently.

Vespucci’s letters had wide circulation and were eagerly read in Europe. People were avid to hear anything about the new lands that had lain undiscovered for so long. The avid interest among Europeans about the New World is comparable to the wide interest created by the moon landing event in modern times.

Vespucci’s letters promoted such wide interest that some felt that he had unjustly undercut Columbus’s premier position. Several factors worked to enhance Vespucci’s wider appeal to the public. First, his reports became available to the public sooner than those of Columbus. Furthermore, Columbus wrote for the eyes of the pious Queen Isabella, so he included no lurid details of the sexual or cannibalistic habits of the natives. Such details certainly added greatly to the wide popularity of Vespucci’s narratives. Within a few years, about forty editions of Vespucci’s Mundus Novus appeared in Latin, Italian, French, German, Flemish, and even Czech.

At this same time, a German professor and cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, was in the process of creating an updated version of Ptolemy’s Cosmography. In it he included a Latin translation of Vespucci’s letter and proposed, “I do not see why anyone would object to its being called after the discoverer Americus [Latin form of Amerigo], Land of Americus, or, America, since both Europe and Asia have derived their names from women.” This suggestion was based on Vespucci’s fabrication that he had landed on the continental mainland (Brazil) a year before Columbus. Waldseemüller put the name America on his map in 1507, and his idea spread quickly, until other writers and cartographers also began calling the land America. Eventually the deception was exposed by a friend of Columbus, Bishop Las Casas, and by Sebastian Cabot, who is known to have created a fictitious voyage of his own. Despite the exposés, the appeal of the name America had already caught on and there was no turning back.  

Several other names were suggested, e.g. Atlantis and Columbiana, but by the time anyone realized that Columbus had discovered the mainland prior to Vespucci, the name America was already too well fixed to make a change. 

Portuguese historian and mathematician, Duarte Leite Pereira da Silva, published História dos Descobrimentos [History of the Discoveries] in 1959. In his study of Vespucci, Leite wrote, “The portrait of Vespucci as a renowned astronomer, acute cosmographer, skilled navigator and audacious discoverer, is purely imaginary, and was made up by his compatriots, whom other admirers followed, thanks to the printing press. In truth Vespucci was cunning, vain, ambitious and with but a superficial knowledge of exact sciences, who as a merchant made two voyages with Spaniards and Portuguese, whom he assisted in their discoveries.” 

Other historians tend to agree, partly because many of Vespucci’s computations of distances, latitudes, and longitudes are so far off that they must be considered fake. Of course not everything Vespucci wrote is false. Many of his latitude measurements are reasonably close, though no better than other navigators. Also, the well-written and detailed narratives he wrote about Brazil are much to his credit. Nevertheless, by predating  his fantasy voyage to 1497, Vespucci managed to get credit for discovering the mainland of the new continent.

 So Vespucci took a voyage with Ojeda in 1499, and through some creative writing made it sound like two voyages, one of which shows himself discovering the mainland of the continent in 1497, a year before Columbus accomplished it in his third voyage. This bit of chicanery gave his name a permanent place in history.

References

Markham, C. R. Introduction; in The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and other documents illustrative of his career. London: Hakluyk Society, no. 90, 1894, reprinted 2010.

Morison, S. E., The European discovery of America: The southern voyages.
New York: Oxford University Press. 1974.


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How the Discovery of Brazil Led to Naming America,  Part 1

4/1/2014

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PictureVespucci landing in America, c. 1580 by van der Straet, Wikimedia Commons
Roger M.McCoy
As a school boy I learned that America was named for Amerigo Vespucci, and that fact was pretty much the end of the story. On further examination I later found  there is quite a story behind the name, with a surprising element of chicanery and chutzpah. It begins with the discovery of Brazil.

Portuguese and Spanish sailors quickly learned that the easiest route around the south tip of Africa’s Cape of Good Hope involved sailing far to the west in the northeasterly trade winds. After crossing the doldrums near the equator, they used the southeasterly trade winds until they picked up the westerlies, beyond 20˚ south latitude, then sailed eastward with a following wind to India. The westward arc was a longer distance than sailing directly along the coast of west Africa, but provided much easier and faster sailing. Also, taking such a route assured that someone would eventually discover Brazil.

It was while making such a maneuver in 1500 that the Spanish navigator, Martin Pinzón, a seasoned explorer who had commanded the Pinta on Columbus’s first voyage, became the first European to see the coast of Brazil. He landed near the eastern tip of Brazil, then sailed north, encountering sea water fresh enough to drink many miles from land. This phenomenon induced him to turn and sail into one of the mouths of the Amazon River. While there he cut and loaded a cargo of logwood (used to make dyes), captured some twenty or more natives, and returned to Spain. Upon reporting his find, the authorities determined from his logbook that the land discovered, was east of the line set by the Treaty of Tordesillas and therefore rightly belonged to Portugal.

In the same year, Portugal sent Pedro Álvares Cabral to cement Portugal’s advantage in south Asia. In March of 1500 he left Portugal with a fleet of fourteen vessels, sailing the westward arc that utilized the trade winds. Cabral, like Pinzón,  happened to encounter the eastern tip of Brazil where he sighted and named Monte Pascoal (Easter Mountain). They sailed into a large bay, now named Baia Cabrália in honor of Cabral. Sensing a good thing, Cabral immediately sent one ship, commanded by Captain Nicolau Coehlo directly back to Portugal with a detailed letter to inform investors and King Manuel I of their discovery. Cabral then continued on to India. News of the discovery quickly spread around Europe, and that same year was recorded on Juan de Cosa’s Mappemonde. 

This first contact with Brazil provided no clue about its immense wealth of resources, and it was first considered only a place to stop for wood and water on the way to India. Historian Greenlee said “Few voyages have been of greater importance to posterity, and few have been less appreciated in their time.”

Manuel I of Portugal sent a ship to Brazil in 1501 commanded by Gonçalo Coelho. Traveling with Coelho was a Florentine named Amerigo Vespucci, who was invited by the king to accompany this voyage and write about it. To understand how Vespucci came by such an invitation we must digress and learn a bit about the man. 

Amerigo Vespucci, born in 1454, has become one of the most controversial  characters in the history of discovery. Assessments of Vespucci range from a charlatan who, at one extreme, never even saw the New World, to a great navigator and discoverer who rightly deserves to have two continents and a nation named for him. He was born to an upperclass family with an ambassador, a bishop, and bankers in the family, and all connected with the powerful Medici family of Florence. In short, Amerigo was very well connected. Amerigo became an employee of the commercial enterprises of Lorenzo de Medici, and at about 40 years of age was sent to Seville as the head of a Medici affiliate. In this position Vespucci was involved with outfitting the Columbus fleet for its third voyage in 1498. He became well acquainted with Columbus, who praised him as a most excellent and honest ship chandler. But Amerigo aspired to the fame of an explorer and left the mundane world of business and finance. His first actual voyage occurred in 1499, on which he traveled to the West Indies under the command of Alonso de Ojeda. Perhaps Amerigo even helped finance that 1499 voyage. On this voyage Vespucci gained some practical experience in navigation.

Apparently something happened between him and Ojeda, and Vespucci abandoned the expedition in Hispaniola and returned to Seville on another ship ahead of Ojeda. Then Vespucci wrote a full account of the 1499 voyage as though it had been his own expedition with no mention of Ojeda, and through his writing convinced the king and financiers that he was an experienced navigator. This may be a good example of a person with some knowledge but little practical experience, who has the gift of convincing people that he is far more capable than his experience would suggest. Vespucci also wrote an elaborate descriptive account of a bogus voyage that supposedly sailed two years earlier, in 1497, under his command. 

Soon Vespucci came to the attention of Manuel I who had just appointed Gonçalo Coelho to go assess Portugal’s new possession in 1501. Thus Vespucci received a royal invitation to go along on this voyage and write about it. Because Amerigo had some earlier experience as a navigator under Ojeda, he took on the job of navigation officer, and he wrote of the voyage with great flourish and self-serving skills. His report was important because it was the first chance for Portugal to see just what they had acquired under the new Treaty of Tordesillas that divided the undiscovered world between Spain and Portugal.

Vespucci published his account in the form of long letters, called Lettera in 1504, and a second tract, Mundus Novus. Both received great distribution and circulation in Spain, Portugal, and other parts of Europe. These letters brought great recognition to Amerigo. Unfortunately there was no benefit or fame for the captain of the expedition, Coelho, because Vespucci never mentions him in either publication. Vespucci claimed to be on his third voyage but, of course, it was really only his second. Again the thirst for information about the New World made Vespucci a well-known name and gave him great publicity. 

Many historians now challenge parts of Amerigo’s writing as false and often exaggerated, especially his claim that the voyage would have been lost without his knowledge of navigation, “Though a man without practical experience, yet through the teaching of the marine chart for navigation, I was more skilled than all the shipmasters of the world.” This guy had chutzpah. To be fair, Vespucci’s narratives were very descriptive and thorough in relating the sights and people along the coastal area of Brazil. Furthermore, they were widely read and popular among the educated class. His deceptions were about where he went and when.      

(To be continued soon in part 2)


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