Amerigo Vespucci
1454-1512
Italian Merchant and Geographer
Amerigo Vespucci was one of the most important personalities of the European Age of Exploration. His vast knowledge of geography would set the stage for the European colonization of the Western hemisphere.
Amerigo Vespucci. (Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.)Amerigo Vespucci was a child of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) would move the Earth from the center of creation to the position of third satellite orbiting the sun. Galileo (1564-1642) and his telescope proved the heliocentric theory, and a questioning attitude would define this early modern period. The development of the scientific method created a process through which humankind could decipher God's "Book of Nature."
Italy was at the center of this knowledge explosion. By the late fourteenth century, certain Italian city-states had seized control of the flow of spice, perfumes, and silk from the East. Florence was the most powerful of these city-states. Into this intellectually vibrant environment, in 1454, Amerigo Vespucci was born. The Vespucci family had been prominent for over a century, with family members holding important positions in the city's government. These family connections enabled Amerigo to receive an exceptional education, including an introduction to the latest geographic theories, and very early in his education he decided to make geography his intellectual focus. The turning point in his formation as a geographer came when he began an intellectual relationship with Paolo Toscanelli (1397-1492). Toscanelli was regarded as Florence's greatest intellectual, and he always stressed the importance of experience over authority. He believed that in the modern world one should reject all knowledge that did not stand the test of empirical examination.
In 1492 Christopher Columbus (1456-1501) declared that he had reached India by sailing west. As this information became public Vespucci began to question the veracity of Columbus's claims. The length of his voyage was less than a month, and Vespucci believed that was too short a period of time to travel such a great distance. Most experienced geographers believed that a degree on the surface of the Earth was equal to 66⅔ miles (107.3 km). Columbus argued that his voyage was shorter than expected because in fact a degree was only equal to 56⅔ miles (91.2 km), thus making the circumference of the earth much smaller than previously thought. Vespucci's second problem was based upon the fact that Columbus had sailed directly west from Spain. It was common knowledge that Bartholomeu Dias's (1450-1500) voyage to the Cape of Good Hope not only had taken much longer than that of Columbus, but he also had to sail south of the equator. These two facts were in direct conflict with the information put forth by Columbus.
Following the training he received from Toscanelli, Vespucci set out to gather his own empirical data and signed on as an expert astronomer for the next expedition funded by the Spanish monarchy. Of the five ships assigned to this voyage, Vespucci was in charge of two. Both ships sailed westward and reached the coast of what is now Brazil. Along with mapping the entire coastline, he also charted territory, which consists of present-day Colombia, Uruguay, and Argentina. He then explored parts of the Amazon, the Para, and the La Plata rivers. The information from these detailed expeditions convinced European scholars that Columbus had not reached India but had found a vast uncharted territory. Vespucci's accurate maps would eventually be used for further exploration of the Western hemisphere, setting the stage for Europe's colonization of the New World. Amerigo Vespucci was held in such high esteem that in 1507 the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller (1470-1521) named this new region "America" to honor Vespucci's achievements as a geographer.
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