Sevilla, Spain March  2011

If there is a good reason why my country is named in honor of Amerigo Vespucci (or the same man in any of his many aliases) I have failed to find it.

In a week of research in this Spanish city which was the center of voyages of discovery to the “New World” in the 1490s and early 1500s,  I learned that the Italian man whose name has been attached to the entire Western Hemisphere was a pimp for the House of the Medici in Florence before he and his family fell into disgrace. 

He moved to Sevilla, Spain, to look after the less than wholesome usury business for another branch of the Medici empire, and there he began his swindle that bankrupted Cristobal Colón (Christopher Columbus) and investors in his failed schemes to capitalize on hyped lucrative trade with China, India and Japan.

Vespucci was an untrustworthy, disloyal fraud, an imposter and plagarist, who claimed credit for voyages of discovery made by others, and who, among other dishonorable falsehoods, never set foot in what would later become the United States. If his name should be attached to any country today, it should be Brazil, the northeastern coast of which he apparently did actually sail past. 

There is at least some agreement that Vespucci did actually make that one trip as he claimed, although most researchers, including the acclaimed scientist and geographer Alexander Von Humboldt,  have concluded that Vespucci did not make the other three voyages as he claimed.

Some authorities on the early expeditions from Sevilla to the Caribbean and along the east coast of South America, contend Vespucci did not deliberately steal credit due Columbus but was instead the hapless beneficiary of a series of improbable errors and misunderstandings that resulted in the name “America” being applied to the lands discovered by mistake on the way to trade in spices and silk in the Orient.

In any event, the naming honor bestowed on this pimp-turned-would-be pearl merchant from Florence has been denounced by numerous authorities and celebrated thinkers. Consider this conclusion by Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Strange that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, 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.”

Or this by Clements R. Markham, president of the scholarly Haklyut Society in London, whose definitive book on the subject, The Letters of Americo Vespucci and other documents illustrative of his career, concludes “The evidence against Vespucci is cumulative and quite conclusive. His first voyage is a fabrication, He cannot be acquitted of the intention of appropriating for himself the glory of having first discovered the mainland. The impartial and upright [Bishop Bartolome de] las Casas, after carefully weighing the evidence, found him guilty.”

Other researchers have been less kind to the man for whom America is named. Duarte Leite, in his book Descubridores do Brazil, wrote, “This fatuous personage is nothing but a lying novelist, a navigator of the caliber of a host of others,  a cosmographer who repeated the ideas of others, a false discoverer who appropriated the glory of others.”

My research in Sevilla’s Archivo General de las Indias and other sources demonstrated, for example, that while the manipulative, smooth-talking Vespucci  was left in charge of Columbus’ affairs in Sevilla, the real discoverer of America became a ruined, broken and impoverished man, hauled back to Spain in chains. And Vespucci, the man who conned his way into a royal appointment as “piloto mayor” (chief pilot) for the Spanish crown’s sailings to the New World, was never a pilot at all, was never given command of a ship. 

The man who brought him to Sevilla, Gianetto Berardi, who managed the deMedici financial interests there, wound up virtually broke after turning the financing of voyages of discovery over to Vespucci. And within 40 years of the Spanish crown appointing Vespucci to oversee financing and outfitting of such discoveries in Sevilla’s Casa de Contratacion (Contracting House), Spain, too, found itself bankrupt despite riches flowing in from the looted civilizations of Central and South America.

In Sevilla, scene of his greatest renown, there is no monument to Americo Vespucci, no statute, no grand boulevard named in his honor. There is a nondescript Calle Amerigo Vespucio in Sevilla... on the less prestigious side of the Rio Guadalquivir down which discoverers and conquistadores sailed to reach the New World. 

Calle Amerigo Vespucio is a 1.5-mile mundane roadway through a 1980s-era industrial-commercial development. The unpretentious street has no monument to Vespucci; the closest thing to a monument is a cell phone tower next to a telecommunications plant, or perhaps the Cafe Vespucio surrounded by vacant storefronts.

On my way to find Calle Amerigo Vespucio, I passed la Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, and popped in to inquire at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas the whereabouts of Vespucci’s tomb. Previous inquiries had been fruitless; no tour guides, taxi drivers or museum or tourism officials had the slightest idea where any commemoration of Vespucci might be.  

With good reason; when he died in Sevilla in 1511 (or 1512, the date of his demise apparently in dispute) Vespucci was buried in la Iglesia de San Miguel, as he had requested. But as the faculty member at the Consejo Superior informed me, la Iglesia de San Miguel was demolished in 1868. Vespucci’s remains were shipped back to Florence. 

I learned the church site is now occupied by the hotel at which I was lodged, Hotel America. It turns out the hotel is named after the country, not the man. No one at the hotel had any idea Amerigo Vespucci had been buried at that location... nor in fact that Iglesia de San Miguel was once on the site.

-Jeff Radford