Felipe Fernandez-Armesto - Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America

A MERIGO V ESPUCCI , who gave his name to America, was a pimp in his youth and a magus in his maturity. This astonishing transformation was part of his relentless self-reinvention, from which sprang a dazzling succession of career moves and what the celebrity press now calls makeovers.

From his late twenties or thereabouts, he began to refashion his identity with a regularity that suggests self-dissatisfaction and a need to escape. First he deserted the service of the ruler of Florence, his native city, for that of a rival. A few years later, in 1491, he abandoned Florence for Seville and turned from his previous businesswhich was as a commission agent, dealing mainly in jewelsto organizing fleets that supplied Columbus's enterprise in the New World. In 1499, at the age of forty-five or so, Vespucci discovered a new vocation, taking to the ocean in person; and within a few more years, he had rebranded himself as an expert in navigation and cosmography. In the course of this last transformation, he shifted from Spanish to Portuguese service and back again. Notwithstanding his lack of qualifications and attainments, he was so convincing in his new role that he became a kind of official cosmographer, with a monopoly from the Castilian crown in the training of Atlantic pilots and the making of Atlantic charts. Some fellow experts hailed him as the new Ptolemya reincarnation of the greatest or, at least, the most influential geographer of antiquity. In the world of the Renaissance, there was no greater praise than to be acclaimed as the equal of the ancients.

Even without the extraordinary accident or error that bestowed his name on the western hemisphere, he makes an appealing subject of biography because of the amazing ease and perfection of these self-reshapings. He negotiated the narrows of life, conforming and reconforming fluidly, as if made of quicksilver. Yet no reputable scholar has ventured to write a biography in modern times. The nearest approach was Luciano Formisano's careful and well-informed biographical essay, included in 1991 as part of a coffee-table compilation of studies marking the approach of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first Atlantic crossing. These are unnecessary strategies. The facts about Vespucci are stunning enough without elaboration. Yet the poverty of his biography has ensured that most of the facts, including those of the greatest interest and power to surprise, have remained unknown. I selected two for the opening sentence of this preface, not only because they are arresting in themselves but also because they are unmentioned in existing biographies and barely discussedat least in printby the handful of specialist scholars currently at work in the field.

The scholarly inhibitions are understandable. Peculiar, intense problems make the sources for Vespucci's life hard to handle with confidence. There is plenty of evidence. Indeed, we know more about Vespucci than any other explorer of his time except Columbus. But the comparison with Columbus is telling. Columbus poured out his soul almost every time he set pen to paper. Vespucci wrote little that survives, and although much of it is, in a broad sense, autobiographical, he never indulged in the sort of self-revelatory effusions characteristic of Columbus's work. Scholarship, moreover, has foundered on the problem of authenticity. Critics have impugned or endorsed all the letters ascribed to Vespucci or published in his lifetime under his name. Debate Still othersincluding all the leading scholars at work on the subject todaysuppose that the texts are a mixture of real and feigned writings of Vespucci's but differ about where the balance lies. The doubts are paralyzing, for vital decisions depend on the letters in question: whether Vespucci was veraciousor, admitting that he was an inveterate liar, the extent of his mendacity; whether his claims to important discoveries are valid; whether he deserves to have a hemisphere named after him.

I believe we can now set the inhibitions aside. The undisputed documents give us a trustworthy set of Vespucci's fingerprints as a writer: his favorite images, his pet themes, his habits of thought, his mental tics. From the disputed materials, we can wrest a reliable match and see how much came from Vespucci's pen and how much from those of the editors responsible for the publications that bore his name. With the help of other sourcesin particular, of surviving letters to Vespucci, which reveal the world in which he moved and the values that moved itit is possible to reconstruct the phases of his life with reasonable certainty and even to penetrate his mind: to see the world as he saw it, to elicit his motives and ambitions, and to expose the reasons, or some of them, for his periodic makeovers. His life can be mapped with the hazy irregularity, vagueness, and distortions of scale of a typical map of the time. There are maddening gaps. I have tried not to fill them speculatively, like some medieval cartographer scattering empty spaces with hippogriffs.

Although I intend this book as a life story, and as an exploration of a mind, huge historical frameworks surrounded Vespucci. I try to sketch these into the background, because nothing he did makes complete sense except in their context. So the book follows him through the various milieus in which he belonged or to which he adapted: the Florence of Lorenzo de Medici; the Seville of Ferdinand and Isabella; the ocean of Columbus; the new continent scoured by pillagers in Columbus's wake; the globe in which Vespucci's reputation resonated, grew, and ebbed. Some readers may find this tedious and yearn for the intimacies of a conventional biography of a subject more vividly visible in closeup. But the background-painting is necessary and, I think, revealing. For although Vespucci made no significant contribution to any art or scienceas we shall see, his cosmography was amateurish, his navigation overrated, his writing feeblehe was an important figure in global history because he was one of the last in a series of adventurers from the Mediterranean who helped conquer the Atlantic and extend across the ocean the reach of what we now call Western civilization.