Who Discovered America?

AMERIGO AND THE NEW WORLD (323 pp.)--German Arciniegas--Knopf ($5).

Everyone knows that Christopher Columbus discovered America, but did he really? A Colombian diplomat and historian, German Arciniegas does not ask the question in his Amerigo and the New World, but the reader is bound to. Columbus boldly sailed through the curtain of fear and superstition that had kept men from trying the dread Atlantic crossing. But he died believing that he had reached Asia, never accepted the fact that the New World was really another continental land mass. The first man to name it the New World was the Florentine navigator and businessman Amerigo Vespucci; at least, according to Author Arciniegas, he also reached the mainland before Columbus.* Arciniegas has given him one of his few book-length biographies five centuries after his birth.

Clearing the Name. The names of Amerigo's contemporaries in Florence read like a glory roll: Lorenzo de' Medici, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci. Good Florentine that he was, he had no trouble mixing an interest in art and ideas with the art of business. While he was in Seville, Spain, as an agent for Florentine interests, he came to know Columbus and King Ferdinand, who gave him the chance to go on voyages that resulted in the first useful maps of the New World's continental coastline.

Columbus had been given the proud title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, but his rewards could more accurately be measured in abuse than in wealth or glory. Amerigo was made Pilot Major by King Ferdinand for all of Spain, and no captain could sail without the certificate that Amerigo alone could issue. His voyages may have been as epochal as Author Arciniegas says they were, but for centuries one school of historians has held that he chivvied his friend Columbus out of his due. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "strange . . . that broad America must wear the name of a thief."

A Name Stuck. The plodding research that has gone into Amerigo may help clear its hero's name, though it does not answer the question at the head of the publisher's blurb: "What sort of man was Amerigo Vespucci?" So little is known for sure about him that it could easily fit into a tightly written essay. Author Arciniegas pads out his book with heavily-written filler about Florence and Spain, never comes close to presenting a talking, walking Amerigo.

During World War II, a retreating German unit dynamited the town of St. Die, in Lorraine. One of the buildings blown up had worn a plaque which told of something that few Americans, North or South, know about. It was there, on April 25, 1507, that a group of scholars and poets ran off on their press a book named Cosmographiae Introductio. In it, for the first time, appeared the name of America. Wrote the author in Latin: "I see no reason why we should not call it America, that is to say, land of Americus, for Americus its discoverer, man of sagacious wit . . ." The name stuck.

* On his first two voyages Columbus discovered Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, etc. Only on his third voyage (1498) did he reach the mainland. Author Arciniegas claims that Amerigo actually reached the continent the year before. From the meager evidence (mainly letters), other scholars doubt this, believe that Amerigo followed Columbus by a year.

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