COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

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678 COSMOS.
and the improvement of navigation, has exercised an im-
in Seville, four years before his death, and with Juan Vespucci, a nephew
of Amerigo's, attended the astronomical junta of Baclajoz, and the pro-
ceedings respecting the possession of the Moluccas; similar feelings
were entertained by Petrus Martyr de Anghiera, the personal friend of
the admiral, whose correspondence goes down to 1525; by Oviedo,
who seeks for everything which can lessen the fame of Columbus ; by
Bamusio ; and by the great historian Guiccardini. If Amerigo had
intentionally falsified the dates of his voyages, he would have brought
them into agreement with each other, and not have made the first voyage
terminate five months after the second began. The confusion of dates
in the many different translations of his voyages is not to be attributed
to him, as he did not himself publish any of these accounts. Such confusions
of figures were, besides, very frequently to be met with in
writings printed in the sixteenth century. Oviedo had been present, as
jpne of the Queen's pages, at the audience at which Ferdinand and Isabella,
in 1493, received Columbus with much pomp on his return from his first
voyage of discovery. Oviedo has three times stated in print that this
audience took place in the year 1496, and even that America was discovered
in 1491. Gomara had the same printed, not in numerals but in
words, and placed the discovery of the tierrafirme of America in 1497,
in the very year, therefore, which proved so fatal to Amerigo Vespucci's
reputation. (Examen crit. t. v. pp. 196-202.) The wholly irreproachable
conduct of the Florentine, (who never attempted to attach his name to
the new continent, but who, in the grandiloquent accounts which he
addressed to the Gonfalionere Piero Goclerini, to Pierfrancesco de'
Medici, and to Duke Eene II., of Lorraine, had the misfortune of
drawing upon, himself the attention of posterity more than he deserved)
is most positively proved by the lawsuit which the fiscal authorities
carried on from 1508 to 1527 against the heirs of Christopher Columbus,
for the purpose of withdrawing from them the rights and privileges
which had been granted by the crown to the admiral in 1492. Amerigo
entered the service of the state as Piloto mayor, in the same year that
the lawsuit began He lived at Seville during four years of this suit, in
which it was to be decided what parts of the new continent had been first
reached by Columbus. The most miserable reports found a hearing, and
converted into subjects of accusation by the fiscal ; witnesses were
sought for at St. Domingo, and all the Spanish ports, at Moguer, Palos,
and Seville, and even under the eyes of Amerigo Vespucci and his nephew
Juan. The Mundus novuf,, printed by Johann Otmer, at Augsburg,
in 150 4; the Raccolta di Vicenza, (Mondo novo e paesi novamente
retrovati daAlberico VespuzioFiorentino,} byAlessandro Zorzi, in 1507,
and generally ascribed to Fracanzio di Montalboddo; and the Quatuor
Navigationes of Martin "Waldsee-m tiller (Hylacomylus) had already
appeared ; since 1520, maps had been constructed on which was marked
the name of America, which had been proposed by Hylacomylus in 1507,
and praised by Joachim Vadius in a letter addressed to Budolphus