Part 20

"Affairs now became curiously complicated. King Emanuel of Portugal intrusted to Pedro Alvarez de Cabral the command of a fleet for Hindustan, to follow up the work of Gama and establish a Portuguese centre of trade on the Malabar coast. This fleet of 13 vessels, carrying about 1,200 men, sailed from Lisbon March 9, 1500. After passing the Cape Verde Islands, March 22, for some reason not clearly known, whether driven by stormy weather or seeking to avoid the calms that were apt to be troublesome on the Guinea coast, Cabral took a somewhat more westerly course than he realized, and on April 22, after a weary progress averaging less than 60 miles per day, he found himself on the coast of Brazil not far beyond the limit reached by Lepe. … Approaching it in such a way Cabral felt sure that this coast must fall to the east of the papal meridian. Accordingly on May day, at Porto Seguro in latitude 16° 30' South, he took formal possession of the country for Portugal, and sent Gaspar de Lemos in one of his ships back to Lisbon with the news. On May 22 Cabral weighed anchor and stood for the Cape of Good Hope. … Cabral called the land he had found Vera Cruz, a name which presently became Santa Cruz; but when Lemos arrived in Lisbon with the news he had with him some gorgeous paroquets, and among the earliest names on old maps of the Brazilian coast we find 'Land of Paroquets' and 'Land of the Holy Cross.' The land lay obviously so far to the east that Spain could not deny that at last there was something for Portugal out in the 'ocean sea.' Much interest was felt at Lisbon. King Emanuel began to prepare an expedition for exploring this new coast, and wished to secure the services of some eminent pilot and cosmographer familiar with the western waters. Overtures were made to Americus, a fact which proves that he had already won a high reputation. The overtures were accepted, for what reason we do not know, and soon after his return from the voyage with Ojeda, probably in the autumn of 1500, Americus passed from the service of Spain into that of Portugal. … On May 14, 1501, Vespucius, who was evidently principal pilot and guiding spirit in this voyage under unknown skies, set sail from Lisbon with three caravels. It is not quite clear who was chief captain, but M. Varnhagen has found reasons for believing that it was a certain Don Nuno Manuel. The first halt was made on the African coast at Cape Verde, the first week in June. … After 67 days of 'the vilest weather ever seen by man' they reached the coast of Brazil in latitude about 5° South, on the evening of the 16th of August, the festival-day of San Roque, whose name was accordingly given to the cape before which they dropped anchor. {57} From this point they slowly followed the coast to the southward, stopping now and then to examine the country. … It was not until All Saints day, the first of November, that they reached the bay in latitude 13° South, which is still known by the name which they gave it, Bahia de Todos Santos. On New Year's day, 1502, they arrived at the noble bay where 54 years later the chief city of Brazil was founded. They would seem to have mistaken it for the mouth of another huge river, like some that had already been seen in this strange world; for they called it Rio de Janeiro (River of January). Thence by February 15 they had passed Cape Santa Maria, when they left the coast and took a southeasterly course out into the ocean. Americus gives no satisfactory reason for this change of direction. … Perhaps he may have looked into the mouth of the river La Plata, which is a bay more than a hundred miles wide; and the sudden westward trend of the shore may have led him to suppose that he had reached the end of the continent. At any rate, he was now in longitude more than twenty degrees west of the meridian of Cape San Roque, and therefore unquestionably out of Portuguese waters. Clearly there was no use in going on and discovering lands which could belong only to Spain. This may account, I think, for the change of direction." The voyage southeastwardly was pursued until the little fleet had reached the icy and rocky coast of the island of South Georgia, in latitude 54° South. It was then decided to turn homeward. "Vespucius … headed straight North North East through the huge ocean, for Sierra Leone, and the distance of more than 4,000 miles was made—with wonderful accuracy, though Vespucius says nothing about that—in 33 days. … Thence, after some further delay, to Lisbon, where they arrived on the 7th of September, 1502. … Among all the voyages made during that eventful period there was none that as a feat of navigation surpassed this third of Vespucius, and there was none, except the first of Columbus, that outranked it in historical importance. For it was not only a voyage into the remotest stretches of the Sea of Darkness, but it was preeminently an incursion into the antipodal world of the Southern hemisphere. … A coast of continental extent, beginning so near the meridian of the Cape Verde islands and running southwesterly to latitude 35° South and perhaps beyond, did not fit into anybody's scheme of things. … It was land unknown to the ancients, and Vespucius was right in saying that he had beheld there things by the thousand which Pliny had never mentioned. It was not strange that he should call it a 'New World,' and in meeting with this phrase, on this first occasion in which it appears in any document with reference to any part of what we now call America, the reader must be careful not to clothe it with the meaning which it wears in our modern eyes. In using the expression 'New World' Vespucius was not thinking of the Florida coast which he had visited on a former voyage, nor of the 'islands of India' discovered by Columbus, nor even of the Pearl Coast which he had followed after the Admiral in exploring. The expression occurs in his letter to Lorenzo de' Medici, written from Lisbon in March or April, 1503, relating solely to this third voyage. The letter begins as follows: 'I have formerly written to you at sufficient length about my return from those new countries which in the ships and at the expense and command of the most gracious King of Portugal we have sought and found. It is proper to call them a new world.' Observe that it is only the new countries visited on this third voyage, the countries from Cape San Roque southward, that Vespucius thinks it proper to call a new world, and here is his reason for so calling them: 'Since among our ancestors there was no knowledge of them, and to all who hear of the affair it is most novel. For it transcends the ideas of the ancients, since most of them say that beyond the equator to the south there is no continent, but only the sea which they called the Atlantic, and if any of them asserted the existence of a continent there, they found many reasons for refusing to consider it a habitable country. But this last voyage of mine has proved that this opinion of theirs was erroneous and in every way contrary to the facts." … This expression 'Novus Mundus,' thus occurring in a private letter, had a remarkable career. Early in June, 1503, about the time when Americus was starting on his fourth voyage, Lorenzo died. By the beginning of 1504, a Latin version of the letter [translated by Giovanni Giocondo] was printed and published, with the title 'Mundus Novus.' … The little four-leaved tract, 'Mundus Novus,' turned out to be the great literary success of the day. M. Harisse has described at least eleven Latin editions probably published in the course of 1504, and by 1506 not less than eight editions of German versions had been issued. Intense curiosity was aroused by this announcement of the existence of a populous land beyond the equator and unknown (could such a thing be possible) to the ancients,—who did know something, at least, about the eastern parts of the Asiatic continent which Columbus was supposed to have reached. The "Novus Mundus," so named, began soon to be represented on maps and globes, generally as a great island or quasi-continent lying on and below the equator. "Europe, Asia and Africa were the three parts of the earth [previously known], and so this opposite region, hitherto unknown, but mentioned by Mela and indicated by Ptolemy, was the Fourth Part. We can now begin to understand the intense and wildly absorbing interest with which people read the brief story of the third voyage of Vespucius, and we can see that in the nature of that interest there was nothing calculated to bring it into comparison with the work of Columbus. The two navigators were not regarded as rivals in doing the same thing, but as men who had done two very different things; and to give credit to one was by no means equivalent to withholding credit from the other." In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller, professor of geography at Saint-Dié, published a small treatise entitled "Cosmographic Introductio," with that second of the two known letters of Vespucius—the one addressed to Soderini, of which an account is given above (A. D. 1497-1498)—appended to it. "In this rare book occurs the first suggestion of the name America. {58} After having treated of the division of the earth's inhabited surface into three parts—Europe, Asia, and Africa—Waldseemüller speaks of the discovery of a Fourth Part," and says: "'Wherefore I do not see what is rightly to hinder us from calling it Amerige or America, i. e., the land of Americus, after its discoverer Americus, a man of sagacious mind, since both Europe and Asia have got their names from women.' … Such were the winged words but for which, as M. Harisse reminds us, the western hemisphere might have come to be known as Atlantis, or Hesperides, or Santa Cruz, or New India, or perhaps Columbia. … In about a quarter of a century the first stage in the development of the naming of America had been completed. That stage consisted of five distinct steps: 1. Americus called the regions visited by him beyond the equator 'a new world' because they were unknown to the ancients; 2. Giocondo made this striking phrase 'Mundus Novus' into a title for his translation of the letter. … 3. the name Mundus Novus got placed upon several maps as an equivalent for Terra Sanctæ Crucis, or what we call Brazil; 4. the suggestion was made that Mundus Novus was the Fourth Part of the earth, and might properly be named America after its discoverer; 5. the name America thus got placed upon several maps [the first, so far as known, being a map ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci and published about 1514, and the second a globe made in 1515 by Johann Schöner, at Nuremberg] as an equivalent for what we call Brazil, and sometimes came to stand alone as an equivalent for what we call South America, but still signified only a part of the dry land beyond the Atlantic to which Columbus had led the way. … This wider meaning [of South America] became all the more firmly established as its narrower meaning was usurped by the name Brazil. Three centuries before the time of Columbus the red dye-wood called brazil-wood was an article of commerce, under that same name, in Italy and Spain. It was one of the valuable things brought from the East, and when the Portuguese found the same dye-wood abundant in those tropical forests that had seemed so beautiful to Vespucius, the name Brazil soon became fastened upon the country and helped to set free the name America from its local associations." When, in time, and by slow degrees, the great fact was learned, that all the lands found beyond the Atlantic by Columbus and his successors, formed part of one continental system, and were all to be embraced in the conception of a New World, the name which had become synonymous with New World was then naturally extended to the whole. The evolutionary process of the naming of the western hemisphere as a whole was thus made complete in 1541, by Mercator, who spread the name America in large letters upon a globe which he constructed that year, so that part of it appeared upon the northern and part upon the southern continent.

_J. Fiske, The Discovery of America, chapter 7 (volume 2)._

ALSO IN: _W. B. Scaife, America: Its Geographical History, section 4._

_R. H. Major, Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, chapter 19._

_J. Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, volume 2, ch, 2, notes._

_H. H. Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, volume 1, pages 99-112, and 123-125._

AMERICA: A. D. 1501-1504. Portuguese, Norman and Breton fishermen on the Newfoundland Banks.

See NEWFOUNDLAND: A. D. 1501-1578.

AMERICA: A. D. 1502. The Second Voyage of Ojeda.

The first voyage of Alonzo de Ojeda, from which he returned to Spain in June 1500, was profitable to nothing but his reputation as a bold and enterprising explorer. By way of reward, he was given "a grant of land in Hispaniola, and likewise the government of Coquibacoa, which place he had discovered [and which he had called Venezuela]. He was authorized to fit out a number of ships at his own expense and to prosecute discoveries on the coast of Terra Firma. … With four vessels, Ojeda set sail for the Canaries, in 1502, and thence proceeded to the Gulf of Paria, from which locality he found his way to Coquibacoa. Not liking this poor country, he sailed on to the Bay of Honda, where he determined to found his settlement, which was, however, destined to be of short duration. Provisions very soon became scarce; and one of his partners, who had been sent to procure supplies from Jamaica, failed to return until Ojeda's followers were almost in a state of mutiny. The result was that the whole colony set sail for Hispaniola, taking the governor with them in chains. All that Ojeda gained by his expedition was that he at length came off winner in a lawsuit, the costs of which, however, left him a ruined man."

_R G. Watson, Spanish and Portuguese South America, book 1, chapter 1._

AMERICA: A. D. 1503-1504. The Fourth Voyage of Americus Vespucius. First Settlement in Brazil.

In June, 1503, "Amerigo sailed again from Lisbon, with six ships. The object of this voyage was to discover a certain island called Melcha, which was supposed to lie west of Calicut, and to be as famous a mart in the commerce of the Indian world as Cadiz was in Europe. They made the Cape de Verds, and then, contrary to the judgment of Vespucci and of all the fleet, the Commander persisted in standing for Serra Leoa." The Commander's ship was lost, and Vespucci, with one vessel, only, reached the coast of the New World, finding a port which is thought to have been Bahia. Here "they waited above two months in vain expectation of being joined by the rest of the squadron. Having lost all hope of this they coasted on for 260 leagues to the Southward, and there took port again in 18° S. 35° West of the meridian of Lisbon. Here they remained five months, upon good terms with the natives, with whom some of the party penetrated forty leagues into the interior; and here they erected a fort, in which they left 24 men who had been saved from the Commander's ship. They gave them 12 guns, besides other arms, and provisions for six months; then loaded with brazil [wood], sailed homeward and returned in safety. … The honour, therefore, of having formed the first settlement in this country is due to Amerigo Vespucci. It does not appear that any further attention was as this time paid to it. … But the cargo of brazil which Vespucci had brought home tempted private adventurers, who were content with peaceful gains, to trade thither for that valuable wood; and this trade became so well known, that in consequence the coast and the whole country obtained the name of Brazil, notwithstanding the holier appellation [Santa Cruz] which Cabral had given it."

_R. Southey, History of Brazil, volume 1, chapter 1._

{59}

AMERICA: A. D. 1509-1511. The Expeditions of Ojeda and Nicuesa to the Isthmus. The Settlement at Darien.