The
Namesake
of America.

Amerigo Vespucci:
Fraudulent Villain,
or Intrepid Genius?

By Dr. Ronald Fritze
October 2, 2007

"He [Amerigo Vespucci] always showed a desire to please me,
and is a very respectable man. Fortune has been adverse to him,
as to many others. His labours have not been so profitable to him
as he might have expected."
— Christopher Columbus to his son, 1505

"It is well here to consider the injury and injustice which that
Amerigo Vespucci appears to have done to the Admiral [Columbus],
or that those have done who published his Four Navigations,
in attributing the discovery of this continent to himself,
without mentioning anyone but himself. Owing to this,
all the foreigners who write of these Indies in Latin,
or in their own mother-tongue, or who make charts or maps,
call the continent America, as having been first discovered by Americo."
— Bartolomé de Las Casas.

Everyone knows that America is named after Amerigo Vespucci (1454?-1512), who was an Italian explorer. For most people, the name Amerigo Vespucci gives away that he was Italian, and since he is loosely associated with Columbus, he must have been an explorer. Beyond those basic facts things start to get fuzzy and conflicted.

One view of Vespucci considers him to be a villain. After all, he stole the credit for the discovery of America from the true discoverer, Christopher Columbus. The villainous Vespucci must be a fraud and a liar as well as a thief.

Others, however, view Vespucci as a hero and, in fact, think that he deserves to have America named after him.

A Brave and Intrepid Genius.

The heroic Vespucci was a genius who mastered navigation and cosmography. He was also brave and intrepid. According to this view, he lead the first voyage to mainland America and later sailed far down the coast of South America, almost to the Straits of Magellan. Besides, even if he did not get to South America before Columbus, at least he knew it was a New World, while Columbus stubbornly went to his grave insisting that he had found a westward sea-route to Asia.

Sorting out the truth about Amerigo Vespucci can be hard, but thanks to Felipe Fernández-Armesto's new biography, Amerigo: The Man Who gave his Name to America (2007), a fresh assessment of Vespucci's significance is now available to the student of history. Fernández-Armesto's work provides a judicious account of Vespucci's life as well as a rigorous analysis of the existing primary sources.

As Fernández-Armesto tells it, Vespucci was neither a hero nor a villain. Rather, he was just the average son of a well-to-do Florentine family, a young man trying to become a success in the world.

If so, how did this average guy steal Columbus's thunder? Simple, he was better at marketing himself.

Where Are the Dog-Headed Men?

Columbus's account of his first voyage was a straight-forward document. He found his "Indians" living simple and peaceful lives. They did not exhibit any aberrant traits such as being Amazons or cannibals. They were not physical monsters, either. Columbus described them as well-formed and attractive — no unipeds, cyclopes, or dog-headed men among them.

The problem is that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers expected sensationalism, sex, and violence. When Vespucci wrote his accounts, he gave his readers exactly what they wanted. Helping matters along, Vespucci's editors, and others who pirated and expanded his writings, just added more tales of lusty native women, cannibals slaughtering and eating the unwary, and freaks of nature roaming the uncharted lands.

Vespucci also had a way of magnifying his role in any enterprise in which he was involved. Instead of being merely a participant in an expedition, he became the leader.

Let's Give Him the Credit.

When Martin Waldseemüller and his colleagues were composing their Cosmographiae Introductio in 1507, they had read that Vespucci had made four voyages to America, including one during 1497 that landed on mainland South America before Columbus. As a result, they decided to give Vespucci credit for discovering America. As they put it:

Now, these parts of the earth have been more extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci . . . . Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why any one should justly object to calling this part Amerige, i.e., the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability. Its position and the customs of its inhabitants may be clearly understood from the four voyages of Amerigo . . . .

The problem is that Vespucci only made two voyages to America. The first took place in 1499, well after Columbus's voyage to South America.

So, did Vespucci lie? That is the assertion of those who view Vespucci as a villainous fraud. But as Fernández-Armesto has convincingly shown, the cause of Waldseemüller's confusion in 1507 was inspired by a published letter purported to be from the hand of Vespucci to Piero Soderini, which made false claims about Vespucci's voyages. The problem is that Vespucci did not write the letter.

Mistaken or Not, It Sticks.

Someone else had produced a fake Vespucci letter full of sensational and salacious detail in order to sell it to a thrill-seeking public. Waldseemüller soon realized his mistake in believing in the authenticity of the Soderini letter, but it was too late, and the name for the new continents became America. It stuck with the public then and continues to stick today.

From the early years of the sixteenth century, people have known that Vespucci did not discover mainland America or sail on four voyages. Unfortunately, the Soderini letter got into print and was incorporated into other published works such as Sebastian Munster's Cosmographiae. At that point, this fallacious information about Vespucci has become virtually immortal.

Scholars may thoroughly debunk the fallacies about Vespucci over and over again, but eventually they will rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of historical inquiry. Earlier in the twentieth century, some editions of the venerable reference work Webster's Biographical Dictionary continued to credit Vespucci with four voyages. Even more recently, the generally reputable Italian scholar Luciano Formisano revived the idea that Vespucci went on four voyages in his Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci's Discovery of America (1992).

While Fernández-Armesto's book convincingly refutes Formisano, the fact remains that Formisano's book is out there and actually provides a handy English translation of various documents related to Vespucci's voyages.

It is the job of students of history to weigh the arguments and make up their own minds as to whether Amerigo Vespucci was a hero, a villain, or just a somewhat average guy who rubbed shoulders with the greats of his day, participated on the sidelines during some of the more significant events of the age of discovery — and puffed up his resume a bit in the process!