Vespucci's Second Voyage — the New World Argued
Amerigo Vespucci sailed in 1501 under the Portuguese flag, having transferred his services after Spain showed little interest in a coast that produced no gold. The expedition left Lisbon in May and was sent specifically to determine what the land south-west of Africa actually was. It had been touched the previous year by Pedro Álvares Cabral, on his way to India, and claimed for Portugal as falling on its side of the line agreed at Tordesillas. The fleet made landfall near Cape São Roque and then followed the Brazilian coast south for months — past the bay Vespucci's party is said to have entered on 1 January 1502 and named Rio de Janeiro, the river of January, in the belief that it was an estuary. They continued to around the latitude of the River Plate and, by Vespucci's account, considerably further, to fifty degrees south, in cold and stormy seas. The distance covered without an end to the coast is what mattered. Asia could not extend that far south, and the land had no cities, no trade goods and no rulers of the kind Marco Polo had described. Vespucci's report, circulated as the Mundus Novus, stated flatly that these were new lands and a fourth part of the world. He also described the peoples he met at length — their nakedness, sexual customs and cannibalism — in passages that were sensational, unreliable, endlessly reprinted, and formative for European ideas of the New World. How much of the account is his own and how much was embroidered by printers is still argued, and some scholars regard the letters as substantially forged. What is not disputed is that the argument they carried was correct and that Columbus never made it. The southern latitudes reached on this voyage were the evidence.
- Year: 1501 CE
