The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, and Other Documents Illustrative of His Career. Bartolomé de las Casas
been performed in thirty-seven days, with a W.S.W. course, and a distance of 1,000 leagues. Such a course and distance would have taken him to the Gulf of Paria, not to a coast in latitude 16° N. Even with a course direct to that point, and disregarding the intervening land, the distance he gives would leave him 930 miles short of the alleged position. No actual navigator would have made such a blunder. He was quoting the reckoning from Hojeda's voyage, and invented the latitude at random. When he came to his second voyage, to make a difference, he halved the distance, saying that he was forty-four days going 500 leagues on a S.W. course. He also gives 15° as the latitude of the coast discovered when he was with Hojeda, though no part of that coast is north of 13°. His crowning statement that, starting from 23° N., he went 870 leagues along a coast always on a N.W. course, is still more preposterous. Such a course and distance would have taken him right across the continent of North America into British Columbia.
Varnhagen accepts the Florentine's latitudes, and assumes that when in 23° N. he was near Tampico, on the coast of Mexico. But he rejects the impossible courses and distances of Vespucci, substituting an imaginary voyage of his own, by which he takes our contractor along the coast of North America, round the peninsula of Florida, and up to Cape Hatteras, where, he confesses, "the finest harbour in the world" is not to be found. But such a voyage is a pure assumption, and as a serious argument it is quite inadmissible. The evidence is the other way. The latitudes are wrong, judging from the one latitude given by the Florentine in his second voyage, while the courses and distances might be relied upon as roughly correct if they were given by an honest man. Their absurdity proves the imposture.
From "the best harbour in the world" Vespucci says that he went eastward for 100 leagues to some very populous islands called Iti, where the people, after severe fighting, were defeated by the Spaniards, 222 being carried off as slaves. Having brought his protégé to Cape Hatteras, Varnhagen would identify Iti with Bermuda. But there were no natives on Bermuda when it was discovered, and no indications that it had ever been inhabited. The islands where this wholesale kidnapping took place, if the story has any foundation in fact, were probably the Windward Islands or the Bahamas, visited by Hojeda with this object after he left St. Domingo. The word Iti appears to have been an invention of Vespucci: perhaps he was thinking of the old Italian form Iti ("gone")—which he uses in its proper sense in his second voyage—or of Hayti, the native name for Española.
There are two, or perhaps three, incidents in the story of the alleged first voyage which happened in the voyage when Vespucci was with Hojeda. The first is the village built on piles over the water. Such a village was discovered by Hojeda at the entrance of the Gulf of Maracaibo, and called Little Venice, or Venezuela. Vespucci describes exactly the same thing in his first voyage, but does not mention it in his second (or Hojeda) voyage. He took it out of the real voyage in order to embellish the imaginary one. Varnhagen argues that there might easily have been two villages built on piles. But that is not the point. The point is, that there is no mention of the fact in its proper place, while it occurs in this imaginary voyage in a way that points unmistakably to the source whence it came. Then there is "the best harbour in the world", where there were friendly natives, and where the ships were refitted, the duration of the stay being given as thirty-seven days in the first, and forty-four days in the second voyage; evidently the same incident, serving for the imaginary as well as for the real voyage. This "best harbour in the world" was, according to Las Casas, the Gulf of Cariaco, near Cumana, where Hojeda refitted. Lastly, there is the encounter with natives, when one Spaniard was killed and twenty-two wounded. Vespucci asserts that an encounter took place during his first voyage with this number of casualties. Las Casas had seen a letter from Roldan, containing information from Hojeda's officers, in which an encounter is mentioned with the same casualties, one killed and about twenty wounded. Modern critics will agree with Las Casas that this coincidence is alone sufficient to prove the fictitious character of the first voyage of Vespucci.
The greater part of Vespucci's narrative of his first voyage is taken up with accounts of the manners and customs of the natives; touching which Las Casas has made some very pertinent remarks. Many of the things Vespucci states could not have been known to him in the few days that he remained on the coast, because he did not know a single word of the language, as he himself confesses. He can only be believed in those statements based on what he actually saw or might have seen, and all these are perfectly applicable to the natives of the coast seen during Hojeda's voyage. The rest are pronounced by Las Casas to be all fiction; as well as his enumeration of the animals he saw. Vespucci gives one word in the native language—Carabi, meaning "a man of great wisdom". Upon this Las Casas remarks that the Spaniards did not even know the names for bread or for water, yet Vespucci wants us to believe that, during the few days he remained at that place, he understood that Carabi signified a man of great wisdom. He got the word, of course, from the name of the people he heard of during the voyage of Hojeda—the Carribs, or Canibas—and made it serve his purpose in this passage. 40
Vespucci does not mention the names of the commanders of the expedition, nor of any of his Spanish comrades; and he gives only one native word, Carabi; three names of articles of food, Yuca, Casabi, and Ignami; and two names of places, Iti and Parias (or Lariab?).
Two of the names for food, Yuca and Casabi, belong to the language of the Antilles, and Vespucci would have heard of them during his voyage with Hojeda. Ignami is an African word, which he would have picked up at Lisbon. The use of the word Yuca, as belonging to the language of the natives of the Mexican coast near 23° N., is one more proof of the imposture of his narrative. 41
The name of Parias requires fuller notice. It is alleged to be the name of a province in 23° N., and is thus spelt in the Latin version. Las Casas, therefore, naturally used it as one argument against the truth of Vespucci's narrative, for Paria was well known to be a province of the mainland opposite the island of Trinidad, discovered by Columbus. But in the Italian version the word is Lariab, an L being substituted for P, and b for s. Varnhagen endeavours to make a strong point of this discrepancy. He eagerly adopts Lariab as the correct form, having found (not Lariab) but two words ending in ab in a vocabulary of the Huasteca Indians, whose country is near the northern frontier of Mexico. It is impossible to ascertain, with certainty, whether Parias, or Lariab, or either, was the word in the original manuscript of Vespucci, which is lost. It is in favour of Lariab that the Italian version was probably printed from the manuscript without previous translation; while the version containing Parias was translated into French, and then into Latin, before it was printed. On the other hand, there is strong reason for the belief that the editor of the Latin version had not then heard of the particulars of the third voyage of Columbus, or of the name of Paria. 42 In that case it could not have come into his head to print Parias for Lariab, and consequently Parias was the original form, and Lariab a misprint of the Italian version. On the whole, Parias is probably correct; but the question is not important, because the evidence against Vespucci is quite sufficient without the Parias argument.
The internal evidence against the authenticity of the first voyage is conclusive. It satisfied the impartial and acute historian Las Casas at the time, and has not been shaken by the arguments of Varnhagen, who did not adduce any new facts. But the external evidence is even stronger. It was evident to Varnhagen that it was a necessity of his argument that an expedition should be provided, with which Vespucci might have sailed. Without vessels and a commander there could have been no voyage. These essentials have been furnished by the rehabilitator of Vespucci with some audacity. It was recorded by Las Casas and Herrera that, after the return of Columbus from his last voyage in 1505, an expedition to follow up his discoveries was fitted out by Vicente Yañez Pinzon, Juan Diaz de Solis, and Pedro de Ledesma, and that they discovered the coast of Yucatan. Herrera gives the date 1506; but the real date was 1508, as given by Peter Martyr. 43 The authority for the narratives of Las Casas and Herrera is the evidence given by Pinzon, Ledesma, and others, in the Columbus lawsuit. Peter Martyr, however, collected his information on the subject independently. Varnhagen suggests that these navigators did not undertake their voyage, in 1508, after the return of Columbus, but in 1497, and that this was the first voyage of Vespucci.
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