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It was the first Corte Real expedition under Gaspar Corte (not the second
expedition) sent to the far NW which departed from Lisbon harbor in May
1501 at the same time as the fleet with which Vespucci is associated was sent
to explore the coastline of what we know as South America as far as
possible to the SW.
Gaspar Corte Real had three ships but only two returned and he was
not on them. King Manuel ordered Miguel Corte Real (after he returned from
a voyage to the Levant) to take 2-3 ships to the NW again in May 1502 to
try to find Gaspar and explore the same land which he was said to have found
to the West of Greenland -- presuambly the region we know today as the
Atlantic provinces of Canada explored not many years earlier by John Cabot for
King Henry VII which explains the little England flags on the Juan de la
Cosa map dated November 1500
The implication is that the Portuguese never ventured to the NW
prior to 1501 although that may be open to debate.
In any case, Gaspar Corte Real was never found. However, this land
is the land or island depicted in the Cantino map and described as "terra
del rey de portuguall" and on other documents as "terra dos corte reals".
In keeping with Lisbon's aggressive legal posture, the Portuguese
mapmakers really cheated and placed this land on the east or Portuguese side
of the 1494 treaty demarcation line in the Cantino map of 1502 with little
Portuguese flags. This same depiction is also found in the Caverio and
Waldseemueller world maps though neither actually draw or give the
north-to-south treaty line as such as one sees in the Cantino map.
Nonetheless,
there is an implicit but quite clear recognition of the Tordesillas treaty
line
in these two later maps.
I think that for political reasons the scholars at Saint-Die deemed
it much wiser not to draw the treaty line down to the south in an attempt
to bisect or subdivide the new southern continent between Portugal and
Spain. And that caution at Saint-Die is entirely understandable since this
institution was directly under the ultimate supervision of the Vatican and not
any other immediate Church entity (such as a Bishop or a powerful monastic
order) and given that situation (the direct institutional link to the
Vatican) it would have been very risky to stick themselves but also the
Vatican
by implication via a major world map into the middle of a very
controversial policy matter affecting the interests of the two Iberian
maritime
powers.
Just as they did in balanacing politically the two dedications to
King Ferdinand and Emperor Maxmilian, the scholars seemed to have looked for
a way to split he difference in subtle ways regarding South America by
giving it an additional name -- addition to the Land of the Holy Cross used by
Lisbon -- by coining the name America for a navigator on the Spanish
payroll but at the same time planting a little Portuguese flag way down at the
bottom of the map, along the eastern coastline.
They leave it open or rather do not try to venture a position as to
exactly how the treaty line runs. And they were not in a position to make
such a technical judgment in any case.
Setting that issue to the side, I stand by my argument that the
simultaneous outfitting and departures of the first Corte Real expedition to
the NW and the one involving Vespucci to the SW in the wake of Cabral's
discovery of Brazil was a result of a high level policy decision in Lisbon to
achieve if possible circumnavigation either through the NW or the SW or if
that was not possible to learn that fact quickly so as to size up whether
they still had the only and shortest route to the riches of Asia..
For her part. Queen Isabella attempted the same to the SW with the
Velez de Mendoza expedition in the fall of 1500 to quickly follow up to
learn more about this new coastline Cabral had discovered only a few months
earlier. Vespucci expected to be on this voyage to explore South America's
eastern coastline but was prevented when a new royal edict suddenly banned
non-Castilians from sailing on voyages of exploration. That is the moment in
the fall of 1500 when Vespucci decided for his future he had to move to
Portugal although I have argued that we cannot rule out that he was (like
Juan de la Cosa on one occasion) really deep down a spy for King Ferdinand
with the royal edict providing Vespucci with a nice cover story as to why he
would go over into the Portuguese service.
When Vespucci rushes back to Spain in late 1504, I have argued that
he is giving that impression to King Manuel that he was quite possibly a spy
all along. Further, I have argued also that suspicion is why King
Ferdinand had to mothball Vespucci (keep him home in Seville after 1504) to
avoid
offending, humiliating King Manuel.
The ultimate humiliation or King Manuel was to learn in 1507 of the
name of "America" for the new southern continent which Cabral supposedly
discovered in 1500 -- although obviously the Spanish reached the northern
coast of South America long before 1500 as we know from Columbus third voyage
in 1498 and now know from Martyr and Trevisan manuscripts that the Spanish
had already found and explored the Pearl coast in 1494-1495. Peter Martyr
refers to "Parias" with a detailed commentary in a letter dated 1495 which
was only published and translated from the Latin in the late 1980s - barely
twenty years ago..
You will not find any of this kind of research and analysis in the
books of Castro, Lester or Schwartz.
Peter Dickson
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