Poor Columbus. His first voyage opened a new chapter in history, his second was a triumph, and his third revealed the existence of a new world. Yet, in May 1499, his life suddenly turned into a nightmare of litigation which was to last several generations. On May 18 Alonso de Ojeda sailed for the Indies armed with royal authorization to explore the new continent, and, on May 26, Columbus was replaced by Francisco Bobadilla as governor of Hispaniola. All new explorers were warned to respect the stretches of coast which Columbus had discovered, but his good Genoese dream of monopolizing the Indies was gone forever.
In an age of luxurious and expensive books, the relative modesty of Louis-André Vigneras’ The Discovery of South America and the Andalusian Voyages belies its importance, or perhaps confirms it. Like Columbus, Vigneras has made a discovery which for the moment is unchallenged: he has rediscovered the importance of the Spanish Notary. From the archives of the Indies and of Simancas he has moved on to the Notarial Archives, and in this little book alone, he refers to them some fifty times, half of them to document for the first time the voyage of Alonso Vélez de Mendoza beyond the Brazilian “bulge.” He begins with a short summary of the discovery of the continent by Columbus in the south and in the north by John Cabot, the other Genoese; goes on to describe how succeeding voyages came to be authorized, financed, organized and equipped; and finally follows the dozen voyages which, during the first five years of the sixteenth century, broke Columbus’ monopoly and completed the western face of South America.
Unfortunately, of the four voyages to the new world which Amerigo Vespucci claims to have made, Vigneras accepts only two. Only Ojeda mentions Amerigo, and in any case it is necessary to correct several latitudes and dates given in Amerigo’s letters. So I, for one, prefer to make one set of corrections instead of another, and give the flamboyant Florentine the benefit of the doubt. At least until proof is found that he was ashore when he should have been at sea (something in the Notarial Archives?); and especially considering that in 1508, after his letters were published and after “America” had been baptized by Martin Waldseemüller, Amerigo became Piloto Mayor del Reino which, if he had lied, was like becoming Director of Manned Space Flights after publishing an evident pack of lies about the moon. Vigneras still feels outraged that America was not named after Columbus, or Cabot, or even Duarte Pacheco (oddly, his favorite), the three who first spoke of it as a new continent, but the fact is that history often garlands those who make the world listen rather than those who are the first to speak, and Amerigo’s marvelously entertaining letters certainly got a hearing.
Vigneras correctly chooses to believe both Amerigo and Vicente Yañez Pinzón when they claim to have sailed south of the equator because they lost sight of the Pole Star. He even believes that Vespucci crossed the Demarcation Line at 25°S., a claim impossible to substantiate without a chronometer. Yet he disbelieves Peralonso Niño when he also claims to have lost sight of Polaris, which is clearly visible at 10°N where Vigneras leaves him. What to believe is the historian’s first problem.
Returning to the book’s virtues instead of dwelling on its few defects, Vigneras not only illuminates the “minor” or “Andalusian” voyages, he paints an excellent picture of its capitalistic aspects. He shows how the business of discovery became a legalized form of private enterprise with stockholders’ meetings, dividends, insurance, and even thinly disguised interest on loans. To compare the value of things is always difficult, but Vigneras’ archives show that with a month’s wages a seaman could buy twenty gallons of wine and sell them at 500 percent profit in America; or acquire an Indian slave who, unlike blacks or even whites captured during the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, could only be enslaved if he were a rebel, cannibal, sodomite, or recalcitrant idolater.
Obviously Vigneras and his Notarial Archives have much more to tell us, and I hope they will do so soon.
