1507.] THE NAMING OF AMERICA 127 sors of the college under his protection were ambitious of literary fame and proud of their literary labors; it would bring, no doubt, great credit to St. Dié if, in a work from its printing-press, the world should be taught that these wonderful discoveries of the ten preceding years were not, as had been ignorantly supposed, the outlying islands and coasts of India, but of a new and unknown continent which separated Europe from Asia. The conclusion, very likely, was jumped at-a lucky guess of over-confident youth, rather than any superiority of judgment. Had these young book-makers lived in Cadiz or Lisbon, instead of the Vosges mountains, they might have hesitated to pronounce upon a question which had as yet hardly been raised, if it had been raised at all, among the older cosmographers and navigators. They rushed in where even Columbus had not thought to tread, and not only announced the discovery of a new continent but proposed to name it. The narrative which Ringmann had edited two years before, " De Ora Antarctica," related only to the second expedition of Vespucci the third, as he called it of 1501. But, from the letter now before Lud and Waldseemüller, they learn much more of the achievements of the greatest of navigators, as they supposed him to be; for they are told that it was at a much earlier period he made the first discovery of these new countries; that he had subsequently explored them more extensively; and Waldseemüller concludes that they must be a fourth part of the world. "We departed," says Vespucci," from the port of Cadiz, May 10th, 1497, taking our course on the great gulf of ocean, in which we employed eighteen months, discovering many lands and innumerable islands, chiefly inhabited, of which our ancestors make no mention." Preface of Waldsee- müller to Voyages. Waldseemüller (Hylacomylus) assuming this date of 1497 to be correct—if it was so given in the letter Lud declared the Duke had received from Vespucci - says in his geographical work, the " Cosmographiæ Introductio": "And the fourth part of the world having been discovered by Americus may well be called Amerige, which is as much as to say, the land of Americus or America." Again he says: "But now these parts are more extensively explored, and, as will be seen by the following letters, another fourth has been discovered by Americus Vespuccius, which I see no reason why any one should forbid to be named Amerige, which is as much as to say the land of Americus or America, from its discoverer, Americus, who is a man of shrewd intellect; for Europe and Asia have both of them a feminine form of name from the names of women." Now in 1497 Vespucci was still residing at Seville engaged as factor or partner in a commercial house. In May of the following year, 1498, Columbus sailed on his third voyage, and for several months Vespucci's claim to original discovery un previous Vespucci was busily occupied in fitting out the ships for that expedition.1 It is impossible, therefore, that he can have gone to sea in May, 1497, to be absent eighteen founded. months. There is no pretence in his letters, nor anywhere else, that he made a voyage earlier than 1497; he was in Seville in 1498; and he certainly was a pilot in Ojeda's fleet when that navigator, in 1499, followed Columbus to the coast of Paria. That Vespucci was the first discoverer of the Western continent is, therefore, clearly untrue, although it is true that his account of such a continental land in the west was the one first published, and by his zealous friends at St. Dié, who attached his name to it. In the suit between Don Diego Columbus and the crown of Spain, lasting from 1508 to 1513, the plaintiff demanded certain revenues by right of prior discovery by his father, the defence of the crown being that Columbus had no such priority. In the voluminous testimony on that trial Vespucci was not named as one for whom precedence could be claimed,2 while Ojeda, under whom Vespucci went on his first voyage, distinctly asserts that the main land was discovered by Columbus.3 It is, nevertheless, probably true that Vespucci explored along the American coast in his several voyages further than any navigator of his time, as he sailed from about the fifty-fourth degree of south latitude to the peninsula of Florida, and possibly to Chesapeake Bay at the north. Whether the St. Dié editors really believed, or whether the dates of his voyages were, in some way, so changed as to make it appear, that he was also the first discoverer of a western continent, are questions which may never be answered. But the use they made of his name was adopted in various works within the next few years, and thus in the course of time America became the designation of the whole Western Hemisphere.1 1 Humboldt, Examen Critique, Tome v., p. 180. 2 Vespucci and his Voyages, Santarem; Irving's Life of Columbus, Appendix. Irving (Life of Columbus, vol. iii., Appendix No. X.) examines carefully all the evidence known at the time he wrote on this question, and Major (Life of Prince Henry the Navigator, chap. xix.) gives some later facts, particularly those relating to the conscious or unconscious fraud of the priests of St. Dié. The subject is discussed at great length by Humboldt (Examen Critique), who believes that the fault was not in the statements of Vespucci, but in the erroneous printing of dates. Vespucci, however, in more than one place speaks of his "fourth voyage" without reference to dates, and it is difficult to understand his relation of the voyage of 1497 as anything else than a repetition of the incidents related by Ojeda As attending his expedition of 1499, on which Vespucci went with him. Harrisse, in his Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, gives a careful account of the books of Lud and Hylacomylus. Humboldt suggests (Examen Critique, Tome iv., p. 52) that Hylacomylus, a native of Germany, must have known that in inventing the word America to distinguish the new conti 1497.] VOYAGE OF THE CABOTS. 129 But even if it were possible to reconcile beyond all cavil the rival claims of the two navigators, and give the honor where, as Voyage of between them, it undoubtedly belongs, to Columbus, there is the Cabots. a third who takes precedence of both as the first great captain who pushed far enough into the unknown seas to touch the main land of the new continent. It is conceded that a voyage was made as early as 1497 by John Cabot, accompanied by his son Sebastian, from Bristol, England, to find the shorter path to India westward. In a little vessel called The Matthew he made his first land-fall on this side. the Atlantic on the 24th of June of that year. Whether the land first seen the Terra primum visa of the old maps - was Cape Breton, Newfoundland, or the coast of Labrador, is still an open question, though the latter is held to be the most probable by some of those who have given the subject most careful consideration. But if the ship held its course of north by west from Bristol, it could hardly have been anything else. At any rate, they sailed along the coast for three hundred leagues, and that could only have been the shore of the main land. These Cabots, then, were the first discoverers of the continent, about a year before Columbus entered the Gulf of Paria, and two years before Ojeda's fleet, in which Vespucci sailed, touched the coast of South America two hundred leagues farther south. manded the But which Cabot commanded this expedition? Here again a doubt is started, and the father and the son has each his advo- Which cates. John Cabot was probably a native of Genoa; but Cabot comhe had lived for many years in Venice, whence he removed expedition? to London with his family "to follow the trade of merchandise." It is not known when he was born, in what year he emigrated to England, or how soon he removed from London to Bristol. He was, it is asserted, learned in cosmography and an accomplished navigator, had nent, he was giving it a name of Germanic origin. He quotes his learned friend Von der Hagen to prove this, who says that the Italian name Amerigo is found in the Ancient high. German under the form of Amalrich or Amelrich, which in the Gothic is Amalricks. The incursions and conquests of the northern people, and those of the Goths and Lombards spread this name Amalrich, from which Amerigo comes, among the Romance-speaking peoples. It was borne by many illustrious men. An attempt has recently been made (Atlantic Monthly, April, 1875) to show that the word America was derived from a chain of mountains in Veragua called Amerique, heard of by the sailors of Columbus on his fourth voyage, and reported by them in Spain. If there were any mountains so called, and the Spaniards ever heard of them, they are not mentioned by any of the early writers, and the theory, however ingenious, cannot stand a moment in the light of the evidence in regard to the derivation of the word from Amerigo by Lud and Hylacomylus. 1 Humboldt, Examen Critique; Biddle, Memoir of Sebastian Cabot; J. G. Kohl, Coll. of Maine Hist. Soc., vol. i., Second Series. Stevens in his monograph, The Cabots, p. 17, thinks that their landfall was Cape Breton. Brevoort, Journal of the Am. Geog. Soc., vol. iv., p. 214, agrees with Stevens. Age of travelled by land in the East, and had heard from men in the caravans of Arabia those strange and captivating tales of the boundless wealth and magnificence of "farthest Ind." He disappears from history in 1498 as suddenly as he appeared two years before, and it is supposed that he died about that time. But whether it was as an old man whose work was happily finished, or as one cut off in the prime of his vigor and his days, there is no record. The son, Sebastian, is said to have been only twenty years of age in 1497. He was undoubtedly a young man, but some suppose a supposition necessary, indeed, to their theory in regard to him and his voyages- that he was not less than twenty-five years of age when he sailed on this voyage with his father. And his birth-place is as uncertain as the time of his birth. He may have been born in Venice; perhaps he was born in Bristol. In one account he is represented as saying: "When my father departed from Venice many yeeres since to dwell in England, to follow the trade of merchandises, hee tooke mee with him to the citie of London, while I was yet very yong, yet having neverthelesse some knowledge of letters of humanitie, and of the sphere."2 But his friend Eden's testimony is: "Sebastian Cabot tould me that he was borne in Brystowe, and that at iiij yeare ould he was carried with his father to Venice, and so returned agayne to England with his father after certayne years, whereby he was thought to have been born in Venice." 3 Discourse of Cabot. Both passages are relied upon as sufficient answer to the objection of Sebastian's youth for the command of so important an expedition; yet neither is conclusive, inasmuch as neither gives the date of the father's emigration to England, while the first proves altogether too much, as it goes on to say: "And when my father died in Sebastian that time when newes were brought that Don Christopher Colonus Genoese had discovered the coasts of India, whereof was great talke in all the court of King Henry the Seventh, who then reigned, insomuch that all men with great admiration affirmed it to be a thing more divine than humane, to saile by the West into the East, where spices growe, by a way that was neuer knowen before, by this fame and report there increased in my heart a great flame of desire to attempt some notable thing." That John Cabot was not dead at the period referred to is just as certain as that either he or his son, or both, sailed in search of a north 1 Letter of M. d'Avezac to Dr. Woods, Maine Hist. Coll., vol. i., Second Series. 2 Report of a conversation with Sebastian Cabot by Galeacius Butrigarius, the Pope's Legate in Spain, first published in Ramusio's Collection of Voyages, copied by Hakluyt and many succeeding authors. 8 Richard Eden's Decades of the New World. 1497.] MAP OF SEBASTIAN CABOT. 131 west passage. But this "discourse of Sebastian Cabot," as it is called, though interesting for the main facts to which it testifies, is entitled to no credit as strictly accurate evidence as to details, inasmuch as the narrative was not repeated by him- the Pope's Legate in Spain who had it from Cabot, till years had passed away, and then some months elapsed before it was put in writing by the author- Ramusio - who first published it, and who cautioned his readers that he only presumed "to sketch out briefly, as it were, the heads of what I remember of it." No reliance, of course, can be put upon such a document on any disputed point. Other old chroniclers, however, notably Fabian, Stow, and Gomara, speak of Sebastian Caboto as the navigator "very expert and cunning in knowledge of the circuit of the world, and islands of the same as by a sea card," who demonstrated to King Henry VII. the feasibility of a northwest passage to the Indies, and who was sent to find it; and on these writers Hakluyt1 relied for his account of the voyage. But Hakluyt substituted the name of John, the father, for that of Sebastian the son,2 and subsequent authors have, for the most part, accepted his correction. account of the Cabot voyage. Then the question of late is still further complicated by a MS. of Hakluyt's recently brought to light. In this the great Hakluyt's chronicler asserts not only that the first expedition was commanded by Sebastian Cabot, but that the voyage itself was made in 1496. His words are: "A great part of the continent, as well as of the islands, was first discovered for the King of England by Sebastian Gabote, an Englishman, born in Bristow, son of John Gabote, in 1496." And again: "Nay, more, Gabote discovered this large tract of firme land two years before Columbus ever saw any part of the continent. Columbus first saw the firme lande August 1, 1498, but Gabote made his great discovery in 1496."4 There is certainly no trustworthy evidence, and little of any sort, of a voyage by either the father or the son in that year, and the main difficulty here is to reconcile Hakluyt to himself. It is less easy to dispose of a map discovered about twenty years ago in Germany, and which is in conflict with all the statements upon this point hitherto relied upon. The map, which is now in the imperial library at Paris, covers the whole world; in its delineations of 1 Voyages, Navigations, etc., by Richard Hackluyt, vol. iii., p. 89. 2 Memoir of Sebastian Cabot, Biddle, chap. v.; Life of Sebastian Cabot, by J. F. Nichols, City Librarian, Bristol, England, p. 46. Rev. Dr. Wood in vol. i., Second Series, Maine Hist. Soc. Coll. * Maine Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. i., Second Series. 5 For detailed description and discussion see J. G. Kohl; also letter of M. d'Avezac to Rev. Dr. Woods. Maine Hist. Coll., vol. i., Second Series. |