The First Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci
The First Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci

Author: Amerigo Vespucci

Publisher:

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 45

ISBN-13: 9781601051394

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2007 Scholar's Bookshelf reprint edition of this London: 1893 publication reproduced in facsimile and with translation and Introduction the central documents for Vespucci and his explorations, including the Soderini letter.

The Naming of America
The Naming of America

Author: Martin Waldseemüller

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13:

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This new book features a facsimile of the 1507 World Map by Martin Waldseemuller - the first map ever to display the name America - and tells the fascinating story behind its creation in 16th-century France and rediscovery 300 years later in the library of Wolfegg Castle, Germany, in 1901. It also includes a completely new translation and commentary to Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann's seminal cartographic text, the Cosmographiae Introductio, which originally accompanied the World Map. John Hessler considers answers to some of the key questions raised by the map's representation of the New World, including "How was it possible for a small group of cartographers to have produced a view of the world so radical for its time and so close to the one we recognize today?"; and "What evidence did they possess to show the existence of the Pacific Ocean when neither Vasco Nunez de Balboa nor Ferdinand Magellan had yet reached it'." There are no easy answers, and yet, as this fascinating book reveals, this group of unknowns created some of the most important maps in the history of cartography, and afford us a glimpse into an age when accepted scientific and geographic principles fell away, spawning the birth of modernity.

Amerigo Vespucci
Amerigo Vespucci

Author: Charles Lester Edwards

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9781906421021

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The biography of Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512), the Italian explorer whose discoveries led to the continent of America being named after him. Amerigo Vespucci made four voyages during which he discovered a lot of the coastline and rivers of South, Central and North America. The first of Amerigo's voyages has been disputed since he first described it, because it meant that Amerigo Vespucci had reached the mainland of America before Christopher Columbus. So instead of the continent of America being named after Columbus, it came to be named America after Amerigo. Often out of resentment at the lessening of Columbus's achievements, allegations have persisted for centuries that Amerigo or somebody else has either fabricated much of what was described of his voyages, or has been mistaken in what was written. Amerigo saw peoples, plants and animals never seen before by Europeans. His crew found the bird song so melodious, and the trees so beautiful and sweet smelling, that they imagined themselves in a terrestrial paradise. His voyages brought him in to contact with thousands of naked natives, who met with Amerigo's crew with anything from a warm and curious welcome to vicious warfare. He described some of the natives as being lascivious beyond measure, especially the women, and that the men took as many wives as they pleased, often marrying their mothers or their sisters. Amerigo wrote that the natives had neither laws nor religion. Many of them were cannibals, some of whom smoked the meat of their victims before eating it. Even some of Amerigo's own men were killed by being pulled to pieces, before being eaten in view of the rest of the crew. Included are all of the first hand accounts of the four voyages, detailed in letters written by Amerigo Vespucci to his friend Pietro Soderini who was Gonfaloniere of the Republic of Florence, and to Lorenzo di Piero Francesco de Medici, who was an Italian banker and politician.

Amerigo
Amerigo

Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2008-12-18

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 030751255X

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In 1507, European cartographers were struggling to redraw their maps of the world and to name the newly found lands of the Western Hemisphere. The name they settled on: America, after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Florentine explorer. In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?” by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a sometime slaver and small-time jewel trader; a contemporary, confidant, and rival of Columbus; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor by dint of a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold. Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration–and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. A product of the Florentine Renaissance, Amerigo in many ways was like his native Florence at the turn of the sixteenth century: fast-paced, flashy, competitive, acquisitive, and violent. His ability to sell himself–evident now, 500 years later, as an entire hemisphere that he did not “discover” bears his name–was legendary. But as Fernández-Armesto ably demonstrates, there was indeed some fire to go with all the smoke: In addition to being a relentless salesman and possibly a ruthless appropriator of other people’s efforts, Amerigo was foremost a person of unique abilities, courage, and cunning. And now, in Amerigo, this mercurial and elusive figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both the man and his remarkable era. “A dazzling new biography . . . an elegant tale.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An outstanding historian of Atlantic exploration, Fernández-Armesto delves into the oddities of cultural transmission that attached the name America to the continents discovered in the 1490s. Most know that it honors Amerigo Vespucci, whom the author introduces as an amazing Renaissance character independent of his name’s fame–and does Fernández-Armesto ever deliver.” –Booklist (starred review)

Letters from a New World
Letters from a New World

Author: Amerigo Vespucci

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13:

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The letters he wrote that convinced Europeans to name the New World America (after him).