e a son; but his widow was
left in circumstances so straitened that she was actually dependent
upon the pension granted her by the crown.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] From Navarrete's _Coleccion de los Viajes y Descubrimientos_.

XVI

HOW AMERICA WAS NAMED

1504-1541

If, in the foregoing narrative, the author has seemed to champion his
hero unduly, going perhaps unnecessarily into the details of his
voyages, it may have been owing to anticipated opposition on the part
of his readers. There has always been a wide divergence of opinion
respecting the merits of Amerigo Vespucci, and the world has never
reconciled itself to his so-called usurpation of the glory rightly
belonging to Columbus.

Even so great a writer as Emerson allowed himself to say: "Strange
that broad America must wear the name of a thief! Amerigo Vespucci,
the pickle-dealer at Seville, who went out in 1499, a subaltern with
Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate, in an
expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant
Columbus, and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name!"

We, who have followed the career of Amerigo Vespucci from its
beginning to its ending, know that he was not a thief; that--except by
implication, as having been a purveyor of naval stores--he was not a
"pickle-dealer"; that he held a far higher rank than boatswain's
mate--as attested by the royal proclamation we have cited, naming him
to be chief pilot of Spain; and that, so far as the evidence of his
contemporaries and his own letters show, he made no attempt whatever
to thrust his personality upon the world.

He did not "baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name,"
though it is true that the appellation by which a hemisphere is known
to-day was derived from Americus, Amerigo, or Americo--whether we
speak it in Latin, in Italian, or in Spanish.

How comes it then, the reader may well ask, that America derived its
name from the Florentine, Vespucci, when it should, by right of
"discovery," have been called after the Genoese, Columbus? The answer
to this question involves the following of clews centuries old,
through a labyrinth of falsehood and misstatement that was built up
three hundred years ago. The first clew may be found on page 197 of
this biography, where mention is made of the translation of Vespucci's
letter to Lorenzo de Medici, by Giocondo, in 1504, and issued by him
under the title _Mundus Novus_. This