Vicente D. Sierra’s book about Vespucci ends with the words: “Ninguno obtuvo tanto con menos derechos” (p. 277). This closing statement confirms the historian’s impression that he has been reading a polemic, albeit one which is basically a “family affair” among two Argentinians.
Alonso de Ojeda, Juan de la Cosa, Bartolomeo Rodán, and Amerigo Vespucci made a voyage to the Pearl Coast in 1499. An account was published in 1504. Someone, perhaps not Vespucci (even Sierra does not heap all the blame on his head), antedated the year of the voyage to 1497. The result has been the “Enigma of Vespucci,” or the “Vespucci Question,” which has been studied by historians for the past century. The roster shines with the names of Varnhagen, Fiske, Winsor, Vignaud, and Almagià. In this century Alberto Magnaghi, in his Amerigo Vespucci: Studio Critico (1924), declared spurious the two letters attributed to Vespucci describing four voyages to America. Thus he acquitted the Florentine of having foisted his name upon the New World by publishing fictitious accounts of a fictitious voyage in which he claimed to have reached the mainland before Columbus. Magnaghi was thus following the conclusions of Henry Harrisse who maintained in the Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima that although Vespucci wrote many things, these did not include the accounts of his voyage which have been transmitted to us. Harrisse added that the original texts of the letters are lost, and that we do not even know in what language they were written.
An extremely pro-Vespucci position, based upon tortuous cartographic reasoning, was adopted by Roberto Levillier in América la bien llamada (1948). This is not the place to analyze Levillier’s work. Sierra, however, uses this book as a takeoff point for an attack on Levillier and “los historiadores vespuccistas.” Entitling his opening paragraph, “América, la mal llamada,” he proceeds to advance his theses, pointing out much that has been known to scholars (and accepted by most of them) for almost a half-century. He traces the publication of Vespucci’s letters and the use of the name “America.” In the process he dismisses almost everything which might redound to the credit of Vespucci, maintaining that “lo único evidente es que usufructúa glorias que corresponden a Colón y a capitanes españoles y portugueses . . .” (pp. 17-18). Surely this is going a bit too far and hardly convinces a reader that this is the dispassionate study which the author contends we lack. Describing Levillier’s research with the words “método habilísimo para un alegato, pero peligroso en una investigación histórica” (p. 251) can only serve to vitiate Sierra’s own case.
The contemporary reader will be much better served by Frederick J. Pohl’s Amerigo Vespucci: Pilot Major (1944), an admiring account, but one which adopts the Magnaghi position. However, this is relatively unimportant. Nothing can detract from Vespucci’s real ability as an explorer and cartographer, a man who developed a system for computing exact longitude and who calculated the circumference of the earth almost exactly (even though Sierra claims that he could not locate the North Star). Nor can anything detract from Vespucci’s ability as a great writer. Unquestionably, he was also a self-publicizer. According to Margaret B. Stillwell, the account of Vespucci’s “third” voyage ran into at least twenty-four separate editions before 1508, fifteen in Latin, eight in German, and one in Dutch. Quite a feat! G. R. Crone in a recent work, The Discovery of America, writes that “what interested Vespucci’s contemporaries, and secured him his place in history, were his striking descriptions of peoples and scenes encountered in the earlier part of the voyage and his claim to have revealed a new world.” A much larger—and better—question than the “Enigma of Vespucci” is what constitutes history and what constitutes literature.
Certainly nothing Vespucci wrote and nothing written by the historiadores vespuccistas detracts from the accomplishments of Christopher Columbus. In Crone’s words: “Columbus probably knew that he had discovered a ‘new world’ and refused to admit it; Vespucci proclaimed he had discovered a ‘new world,’ but probably wasn’t certain he had.” After reading this book I am more than ever convinced that this judgment accurately fixes the places of the two men in history, Sierra and Levillier notwithstanding.
