Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci's Discovery of America.

Amerigo Vespucci. Ed. Luciano Formisano. Trans. David Jacobson. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1992. 6 pls. + xli + 214 pp. $24.

Drawn from various sources, the texts conveniently assembled here allow the reader to examine evidence concerning the early exploration and naming of the Western hemisphere. The introductory matter consists of a short foreword by Garry Wills and a longer essay on Vespucci by Luciano Formisano. The heart of the book offers a dozen sixteenth-century texts: the six letters attributed to Vespucci (translated from Formisano's 1985 critical edition), and six reprinted excerpts from writers such as Waldseemuller and Las Casas. Despite their symmetry of presentation, these dozen texts present a complex labyrinth which frustrates modern attempts to retrace Vespucci's actual voyages. Of Vespucci's extant letters, only two (Formisano's numbers 5 and 6) were published during his lifetime; the others were published from manuscript copies between 1745 and 1937.

The stakes in interpreting these letters are high, since they involve the "American" baptism of the New World. The origin of the name "America" was indeed contingential: in his 1507 Cosmographia, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller (who styled himself Hylacomilius) proposed naming the new continent after the Florentine "navigator" Amerigo Vespucci (1452?-1512).

Waldseemuller based his proposal on a Latin version of a letter by Vespucci, which asserted the Florentine's primacy in reaching the South American continent. By this account, Vespucci reached the mainland of Venezuela on May 28, 1498, anticipating by three months Columbus' arrival there on August i of the same year. The veracity of Vespucci's two "public" letters was subsequently impugned, most notably by Bartolome de las Casas, who postdated Vespucci's first voyage to 1499. (Since his father had sailed with Columbus, Las Casas was partial to the posthumous reputation of the Admiral, which he thought eclipsed by a wily Florentine fabricator. By contrast, Columbus' only extant reference to Vespucci commends him in honorable terms.) In any event, internal contradictions between Vespucci's accounts suggest that they were rewritten (by patriotic Florentines?) to rival and surpass the achievements of Columbus' four voyages.

Unlike Columbus, Vespucci came late to navigation. Before his earliest voyages, his career followed the commercial channels of Florentine merchants in Spain. His eventual title of piloto mayor probably refers more to his bookish learning in geography than to practical experience as a navigator. While seeking to verify and expand on Ptolemy, the extant letters often echo Marco Polo and Dante. Indeed, all six letters contain elements of the fantastic which make Vespucci seem more indebted to travel literature than to scientific observation and recordkeeping. Yet whatever his defects as an explorer and author, Vespucci realized his hopes for fame inadvertently through the Latin publication of Waldseemuller's Cosmographia, which shared the Florentine's aim of updating Ptolemy.

Although the "Vespucci case" suggests that the press is mightier than the sword, its presentation here is not entirely free from lapses of the pen. On occasion, Formisano's elevated style proves difficult to navigate: in one passage he describes the discrepancies of tone in Vespucci's letters, citing how "in the one from Cape Verde the unmentioned baxos of Guiana or Venezuela give way, in the knowing, Marco Poloesque style of a Lusitanized Alexandrian Jew, to the ancient, fabulous bazaars of the Far East" (xxxiii). In the context (and contest) of national rivalry, some minor corrigenda might be proposed. The Catalan Rodrigo Borja (pope Alexander VI) appears as the "Spaniard Alessandro Borgia" (xi), and the Swiss humanist and printer Simon Grynaeus is Italianized as Simone Grineo (xxiv). When in his second letter Vespucci enumerates some twenty spices and drugs traded by the Portuguese (26), the reader is apt to be puzzled by items such as "mummy" (a bituminous resin) and "cadmium" (presumably cadmia or calamine, since the element was only discovered in 1817).

Such quibbles hardly detract from the usefulness of the volume, however, which forms a timely and informative compendium of texts related to the Columbian quincentenary.