The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci

 The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci & other documents illustrative of his career by Amerigo Vespucci. 1500s. Translated from the italian by Clements R Markham. Ebook. December 13, 2023.

America is named after Amerigo Vesupcci, a rich Italian merchant from the 16th century who became an explorer of the New World. He supposedly visited the New World four different times. He wrote letters about each trip, known as “The Four Voyages.” I just read those four letters, which adds up to around 30 pages. Generally Vespucci is credited with being the first person to realize that the Americas were a new continent, & not part of the Indies.

Most historians think that two of the letters might be greatly exaggerated or made up, either by Vespucci or by some other anonymous person. The most interesting letter imo, the first letter, is probably fake. It is the letter with the most sensational details, & the biggest adventures.

I love this sentence: “What a thing it is to seek unknown lands, & how difficult, being ignorant, to narrate briefly what happened.”

There is a lot of talk about the Native Americans being cannibals. After researching more about it, it seems like a lot of early literature about the Americas mention cannibalism as being commonplace among the indigenous people the crew meet. There were definitely instances of ritual cannibalism (the Aztecs for example) & instances of tribes eating part of the bodies of those they killed in war in order to gain power from them, but there is very little evidence that Native Americans ate each other for food, & certainly not on a regular basis. 

Didn’t learn much about what type of person Vespucci was. The interesting stories are broken up by long boring factual descriptions of where the ships went on certain dates.

• “They eat little flesh, unless it be human flesh… For they eat all their enemies that they kill or take, as well females as males, with so much barbarity that it is a brutal thing to mention…”

• “...human flesh is an ordinary article of food among them.”

• “I have seen a man eat his children & wife; & I knew a man who was popularly credited to have eaten 300 human bodies.”

• “Only four boys remained in the canoe, who were not of their tribe, but prisoners form some other land. They had been castrated, & were all without the virile member, & with the scars fresh, at which we wondered much.”