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Dear Maphisters:
While I continue to wait for some challenger to step forward and
refute my multidisplinary dossier regarding what the Euopeans knew about the
New World (especially the new southern continent) and when they knew it, I
will limit my comments to two particular issues which have been raised in the
past few days on Maphist.
Fernandez-Armesto & the "Secret" Essay
Fred Shauger says that Hessler (formerly known as Mr. X) shared this
unpublished "secret" essay with Filipe Fernandez-Armesto, evidently one of
"the Vespucci scholars with whom Hessler states he had shared his essay.
Fred goes on to say that that F-A actually cites this essay in his Vespucci
biography which was published in 2007.
Given F-A's strongly expressed utter contempt for Vespucci and stated
low opinion of Roberto Levillier's Imago Mundi essay (1955) about how far
Vespucci sailed along the eastern coastline of South America in 1501-1502,
it seemed counterintuitive to me that F-A would have seen any value in this
essay by Hessler who seems to admire Levillier's superb Imago Mundi essay
as I do. Keep in mind F-A (like Samuel Eliot Morison) makes clear in his
book that he does not think that the Portuguese ever sailed much beyond the
point that Cabral reached at 23 degrees latitude south in the Spring of
1500. F-A not only has no use for any speculation about the west coast, he
broadly suggests that the Cantino map and most others that depict an east
coast for South America were fantasy maps based on pure speculation.
Given this situation, what value would F-A have placed on Hessler's
essay? None that I could imagine. But I checked F-A's Vespucci biography
to be sure I did not overlook a Hessler citation. I cannot find one.
Perhaps it is there and I will be happy to learn where it is if someone would
be
so kind to tell me its location.
Afonso on Vespucci's Sailing Directions
Paulo Afonso whom I thank profusely in the preface my book The
Magellan Myth: Reflections on Columbus, Vespucci and the Waldseemueller Map
of
1507, for directing me to the all-important Lenox Globe, is recycling the
old claim that the Portuguese expedition that Vespucci was on in 1501-1502
spun away from the coastline at 32 degrees latitude and veered off into the
deep South Atlantic to reach 50 degrees latitude south.
Paulo is wrong and this can be shown on several levels.
First, Levillier followed by Arciniegas make a strong argument that
there was no rational incentive for this expedition to swing away from the
coastline like that and I have argued that the African analogy was foremost
in the minds of the Portuguese explorers at that point.
By this I mean the desperate need to answer the Big Question of
whether there was a second southern water passage (in addition to the Cape of
Good Hope) that might lead to Asia and which side of the treaty line that
passage (if it existed) might fall: on the Spanish or Portuguese side? Queen
Isabella dispatched the Guerra-Velez de Mendoza expedition quickly in the
summer of 1500 to help answer that question and this was expedition that
Vespucci expected to be on but was blocked by a sudden royal edict barring
foreigners (see Louis Vigneras, The Discovery of South America and the
Andalusian Voyages, 1976)
We know also that Johannes de Besicken published in Rome in 1505 a
letter from King Manuel to King Ferdinand and there is a passage about prior
discussions about whether this new land was a continent or an island -- all
this 2 years before the Waldseemueller map!! It is in my view that it
was in Lisbon's self-interest to give the Spanish impression that this was a
continent and not an island with a southern water passage -- or if it was
an island with such as passage, the eastern coastline curled far enough to
the SE to place the cape/strait on the Portuguese side of the treaty line
(e.g. see what is conveyed or suggested in the Lenox Globe, Cantino map)
This was Portuguese disinformation pure and simple. Paulo can buy it
but there is no reason for the rest of us to swallow it.
What about Vespucci? Where was his mind?
Well we know that in his letter that leaked and was published in at
least 3 editions in 1503-1504 and many times later with the title Mundus
Novus Vespucci claims that they followed "a long, unbending coastline" and
never hints at a departure from it. Not at all. In fact, in another
unpublished letter to Lorenzo Medici dated to 1502 shortly after this voyage
was
completed in mid-1502, we can clearly see that Vespucci says that they
sailed by this coastline "always on a southwest, 1/4 west course" to a point
50
degrees below the Equator (see Letter III on pages 29-30 in Letters from a
New World edited Luciano Formisano, 1992).
Given the internal consistency between this unpublished letter and the
Mundus Novus version, why then an alteration in the Italian edition of
Vespuci's Letters (the Four voyages) and also in the Saint-Die Latin edition
of that same expedition that asserts a departure from the coastline to SE
and being way out to sea when it reached 50 degrees below the Equator?
For their part, Levillier and Arciniegas speculate that Portuguese
censors forced Vespucci to alter his text or perhaps they altered it and then
peddled that altered text, after Vespucci returned to Spain. We do know
that the Portuguese had a thin skin about disclosures of what they considered
highly sensitive (Top Secret) information about the true physical nature
of this coastline. As I noted in a previous post on Maphist,
Albert Ronsin cites a November 1504 royal edict that prohibited any
depiction and presumably any discussion of this coastline below 8 degrees
latitude south -- well short of where reached during his voyage in 1500.
However, there is a better, more credible explanation for the textual
alteration and new narrative that Vespucci offers regarding this 1501-15-02
voyage and you can find it in my book, The Magellan Myth.
When you study the documentation more closely you can see that it was
probably not the Portuguese censors who had to pressure Vespucci to alter
his account but much more likely that he made this decision on his own after
he suddenly realized that Lorenzo Medici's follow-up questions in letters
in 1502 brought home to him that he had said and revealed far too much to
the Italian scholar in Florence.
We can see Vespucci's fumbling ex post facto attempt at
self-censorship in his reply to Medici's follow-up questioning about that
particular
voyage in another published letter (Letter IV which is known as the Ridolfi
fragment in Formisano's edition of Vespucci's letters).
It is here (circa late 1502) that Vespucci takes upon himself to
rewrite the account he articulated in Letter III and in the letter than became
known as Mundus Novus about what happened because in Letter IV Vespucci
says to Medici:
"In truth, when we were at the latitude of fifty degrees, we were
at sea and not on land,
because when we managed to push off from land, we were not at a
latitude greater
than 32 degrees, and we sailed to the southeast until we arrived
at the said latitude
of 50 degrees without finding land" (See Formisano's anthology,
page 37)
Ha Ha and Ah Ha! "In truth" -- Vespucci now says to Medici "In
truth"? Meaning what? Perhaps something like -- I am so sorry I misspoke or
misled you. Lorenzo. Well Well. This is a rather dramatic and impossible
to camouflage alteration of Vespucci's prior explicit descriptions/accounts
to Medici.
Clearly Vespucci was trying to take back what he had conveyed to
Medici in prior communications.
Furthermore, and as F-A observes, the Letter IV/the Ridolfi fragment
is odd because of the uncharacteristic sour tone or mood conveyed by
Vespucci in this specific letter which I believe reflects his irritation with
the
awkward follow-up questions that the naturally curious Medici was asking
in behalf of himself and quite likely other Florentine intellectuals with
whom Medici had shared Vespucci's letters. Vespucci at one point conveys
some irritation about getting the impression that his letters have been shared
for circulated -- hence his nervousness about what he had said earlier.
In conclusion, I argue that before departing on his last voyage for
Portugal in May 1503 Vespucci was already troubled by how much he had
revealed to Medici who evidently was trying to get Vespucci to reconfirm or
pindown that it was along the coastline that the 50 degrees had been reached.
In response, Vespucci beats a retreat and tries to peddle a new/altered
narrative in the hope that Medici will buy it and deflect attention or memory
about what was said in the earlier accounts.
But Vespucci failed in this attempt.
Somehow after Vespucci departed on his last voyage in the Spring of
1503 a letter containing the original account to Medici on this sensitive
point slipped out into the public domain in published form known as Mundus
Novus by late 1503. And I have argued that this was extremely damaging to
Vespucci when he finally returned to Lisbon in June 1504. If not exactly
then, then not long thereafter because Mundus Novus also contains a statement
to Medici about how Vespucci was withholding from King Manuel his written
accounts of his two voyages for Spain/Queen Isabella (King Manuel's
mother-in-law).
You can imagine how livid King Manuel would have been upon learning
that the wildly popular Mundus Novus which reveals too much about the new
southern continent and also ironically makes him look like a man who has been
kept in the dark about Spanish exploration. In my opinion, the publication
of Mundus Novus killed Vespucci's career in Portugal and he had get out
fast by late 1504 which in fact he did. We soon mind him at Columbus home
in Seville in February 1505 spilling his guts to the Admiral (for more about
this highly revealing development see my book which offers so much more
than what you will find in Toby Lester's book).
This is the true story. The story about departing from the coast and
sailing to the SE in the deep South Atlantic was Vespucci's fumbling and
ultimately unsuccessful attempt at damage limitation by peddling
(ex post facto) disinformation to his Italian interlocutors. It did not
quite work.
But he evidently stuck with his story line because the later account
of the so-called Third Voyage of 1501-1502 retains the bogus story about
shift to the SE and the 50 degrees at sea. Ringmann and Waldseemueller
published that version but never bought into it as one can clearly see from
their
statements, maps/globe gores, etc. They knew that the coastline did not
bend to the SE as Cantino suggests, and that there was a southern water
passage and that a west coast had been found -- meaning an island-like
continent.
They had other non-Vespucci sources, and surely a deep one -- a Deep
Throat -- in Lisbon to whom or which Ringmann and Gauthier point in their
statements. There were leaks coming from Lisbon which King Manuel could not
stop with his plumbers and this explains why we have not only
Waldseemueller's depictions but also the Lenox Globe and the Rosselli map of
1508 and
roughly 18 other cartographic items (see Table A in my book) which convey the
existence of "a land surrounded by a vast ocean" to quote Ringmann.
We cannot exclude the possibility Vespucci himself saw the strait or
knew that other navigators in the Portuguese service had found it before
he returned to Spain. I gave voice to that suspicion in my first essay in
Exploring Mercator's World in late 2002 and Hessler's unpublished essay
suggests that this remains a distinct possibilty.
Whatever the truth about the exact state of Vespucci's personal
knowledge, Paulo is wrong about the shift to the SE.
This should be a good lesson for those who wish to challenge me on
substantive grounds relating to my multidisciplinary dossier which -- unlike
Gavin Menzies wild Chinese-first theories -- remains unrefuted. You need
to be well-prepared if you want to try to take me down in a debate to
convince others that I have not prevailed with my scholarship.
Peter Dickson
Arlington, Virginia
(703) 243-6641
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