Book Description

An excerpt from the beginning of the introductory, "Vespucci's Works": LE QUATTRO GIORNATE. Diary and Common-place Book, written during the course of his first four voyages, and containing astronomical diagrams and drawings of remarkable objects. Now lost, and only known by his references to it in the Lettera. EPISTLES TO LORENZO DI PIER FRANCESCO DE MEDICI. All now lost. The one usually considered to be an account of his third voyage (but which also contains a short summary of various observations made in his first three voyages), written probably about the end of 1502, was saved from the complete destruction which has been the fate of the others, by being translated into Latin by "Jocundus interpres ut latini omnes intelligant." This translator was the celebrated Fra Giovanni del Giocondo, of Verona, then resident in Paris. The original was presumably in bastard-Italian, like the Lettera to Soderini, but it cannot have been ever printed, since the Italian or Venetian form of it, which appeared (for the first time) in the Paesi of 1507, is merely a re-translation from the Latin. The Latin translation and the Italian re-translation were printed several times between 1503 or 1504 and 1521; and were substantially reproduced in the compilations of Grynæus and Ramusio. LETTERA DELLE ISOLE NUOUAMENTE TROUATE. Written at Lisbon in 1504, and printed at Florence probably in 1505, for Pietro Pacini, of Pescia. This is the work now produced in facsimile, and is apparently the only narrative by Vespucci of which the original text has survived. (The other three Letters attributed to him, and printed in the last and the present century, are decidedly supposititious.) It was translated into French, probably in 1505 or 1506, we know not by whom, and from this lost French translation, a Latin version (generally accurate enough, but comprising several significant errors and mistranslations) was made, and printed for the first time in 1507 as a supplement to Waldseemüller's Cosmographia Introductio, and frequently afterwards. It is said in the Speculi orbis declaratio of Gualterius Ludd (printed, like the Cosmographia, at St. Dié, in Lorraine, 1507) that the Latin translation was made by Jean Basin de Sendacour. It might seem more likely that he made the French version, and that Waldseemüller was responsible for the Latin one; but to whomsoever we may ascribe the latter text, it is from this that Europe for more than three centuries derived its knowledge of Vespucci's voyages, and to this that we may trace the origin of the name America, bestowed by Waldseemüller, and sanctioned by many other scholars of France and Germany. In the various editions of the Novus Orbis which is known under the name of Grynæus, the account of the four voyages was reproduced in Latin from the Cosmographia; and Ramusio has given an abridgment in Italian of the third and fourth voyages only (his attention being chiefly directed to the results of southern and African explorations).