Original spin: how lurid sex fantasies gave us "America." - letters of Amerigo Vespucci

Washington Monthly, March, 1993 by Jack Hitt

When I was in Mrs. Poulnot's third grade class, history was taught in tableaux. Christopher Columbus was forever peering from a gunnel, crying "Land ho!" Amerigo Vespucci was eternally gazing at the stars, sextant in hand.

In the past year, many of us have had the Columbus tableau radically rearranged. Among other things, we now know that he was not the first to spy land. A simple seaman named Rodrigo de Tirana actually had that honor. Now, in my mind's eye, Columbus has stepped back from the bow; I see him down below, writing false log entries, mumbling to God and worrying himself mightily about whether Isabel would cheat him out of his payments- which she did.

Amid all this revision, one figure of this era has gone unexamined. Amerigo Vespucci remains the kindly mapmaker who lent his name to both continents of our hemisphere. I can remember asking Mrs. Poulnot: "What did he do that was so great? Why aren't we the United States of Columbia?" She thumped me on the head with her engagement ring and sent me to the principal's office.

The question still seems a good one to me, and I recently descended into Columbia University's stacks to find an answer. There was, I learned, a precise time and place when Amerigo's name become ours, and in the depths of Butler Library, I found the identity of the obscure man responsible for christening a third of the earth. It turns out that the tableau of Amerigo the mapmaker needs some tinkering, too. The story of our baptism is a glorious chain of mistakes so tawdry and preposterous that it is prophetically American.

Despite the generous treatment he receives in third-grade history books, Amerigo the man was a dweeb. He was born into a family of great prominence and connections in 15th-century Florence (the model for Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" was his cousin, Simonetta). All the advantages of an aristocratic birth notwithstanding, Amerigo was not one of the brighter lights of his class. In fact, he flunked. As was typical in those days and these, his parents procured Amerigo a sinecure, in this case working as a steward for a member of the notorious Italian banking family, Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de Medici.

By the time Columbus raised his sails, Amerigo had worked his way up to a plum posting in Seville, Spain, where he toiled for the Medicis as an accountant. But Amerigo, perhaps looking for a more fulfilling avocation, soon threw himself into collecting maps and books on cosmography and astronomy. Around the turn of the century, he contrived to sail on at least two voyages bound for the New World.

Amerigo served as mapmaker on these voyages tracing the coast of South America. In one harbor, he observed that the natives elevated their huts on pilings above the water and was reminded of Venice. On his map he wrote, "little Venice," or in Spanish, "Venezuela." On another occasion Amerigo entered a huge fiver during January. Plumbing the shallows of his imagination, he wrote in Portuguese, "Rio de Janeiro."

At this point in the story, the standard explanation in the grade-school textbooks starts to crumble. We all learned that Amerigo's maps launched his fame. But this was an era overwhelmed with cartography, and what was to distinguish Amerigo's maps was what accompanied them. After each of his voyages, Amerigo wrote long letters home: one to his employer, Lorenzo de Medici, and another to the political boss of Florence, Piero Soderini. These two letters represent our namesake's true legacy. Without them, this dull accountant would have disappeared into the vapors of history.

Goodbye, Columbus

Why didn't Mrs. Poulnot or the textbooks mention these letters? One has only to read them to understand. Amerigo's letters are delicious dispatches laced with wild adventures, bizarre events, and lewd encounters. They are outrageous even by the jaded standards of license we maintain today. But to truly appreciate the content of the letters, one has to realize that Amerigo didn't write them.

The originals have been lost. What we have are copies published on a then-newfangled machine called a printing press. These letters, by whatever path, found their way to the media of the day--printers who knew they could make good money peddling pamphlets crammed with fresh information about the New World.

These journalists lived during the infancy of the printing press, and their new technology was reshaping the Old World as rapidly as the computer has transformed our own. Venice, for example, employed 268 printers soon after Columbus departed.

At this time there was no First Amendment, no copyright law, and no tradition of authorship. These scurrilous, mercenary printers simply rewrote Amerigo's flat prose and exaggerated his plodding descriptions of the New World in an early stab at yellow journalism. Indeed, if hype has an origin, it may well be here in the letters of Amerigo Vespucci.

The most obvious evidence of the journalists' sloppy hand is in the reckless disregard for the facts. One transatlantic route, as written, would have sailed Amerigo across the belly of South America into the Pacific Ocean, somewhere near the Galapagos Islands. Another route would have plowed directly through the continental United States to Puget Sound, Washington. But the most compelling evidence is the occasional burst of lewd prose. Imagine your average squire in 1505 reading the following description of the randy savages of the New World: