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.

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.

The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci
The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci

Author: Amerigo Vespucci

Publisher:

Published: 2019-06-23

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 9780359747078

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Adventurer, merchant and mapper of the New World, Amerigo Vespucci's life is fascinating and vivid ? his letters, published here in full, reveal his discoveries. Born in Florence in the mid-15th century, Vespucci expressed an interest in the newly-discovered lands across the Atlantic Ocean from an early age. Educated by his uncle, a learned Dominican friar, in youth that Vespucci displayed a talent for money matters and mathematics ? these talents helped during his sea expeditions, which saw him draw many of the first maps made of South America's coast. This book does not merely contain Vespucci's own writings, but also letters of other authors who refer to him and his accomplishments. Christopher Columbus praised Vespucci's competence, while he is alluded to multiple times in the writings of historian Bartolome de las Casas. The compiler, annotator and translator of these correspondences is Clements R. Markham, who is keen to reveal the character and deeds that underpin Amerigo Vespucci's reputation.

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)