The Name & The Man

AMERIGO VESPUCCI, PILOT MAJOR--Frederick J. Pohl--Columbia University Press ($3).

Amerigo Vespucci first sighted the coast of Brazil late in June 1499. Vegetation grew so thickly at the water's edge that his ships could not land. The air was scented with flowers, gums, resins, wet wood, rotting leaves, redolent barks and fruits. Because it smelled good (and with a playful passing bow to Saint Ambrose), Amerigo Vespucci named the land "Ambrosia," and sailed southward to find the passage to India.

As all the world knows, Vespucci's christening did not stick. A Viennese writer sensationally garbled his dry, precise accounts of his discoveries, making boasts and claims that Vespucci himself never made. They were widely read, and in 1507 a German cartographer applied Amerigo's name to the whole New World.

For centuries Vespucci has been considered the undeserving recipient of an honor which rightfully belonged to Columbus. Emerson called Vespucci a thief. Now Biographer Pohl rises to point out that Amerigo Vespucci was actually a man of whom Americans can be proud: one of the greatest in an age of great seamen.

Lindbergh of the Caravels. A successful Florentine businessman, and a famed astronomer and geographer, Vespucci did not become a sailor until he was 45. Then he proved himself a Lindbergh of the caravels, sailing to his destinations with cool calculations and almost without excitement. Where Columbus was visionary, gifted, brilliant and brave, Vespucci was industrious, modest, thorough. Readers of this scholarly new biography may feel that it was one of history's tragedies that Columbus and Vespucci did not sail together. Columbus was the great discoverer, but Vespucci sighted more new territory. He traversed 3,000 miles of the South American coastline on his first voyage in 1499, and 4,000 miles on his second in 1501.

In 1501 Amerigo Vespucci calculated the circumference of the earth at the equator at 24,852 miles. Modern science has found it to be 24,902. (Columbus' estimate was 6,125 miles short.) On his voyages Amerigo remained awake, night after sleepless night, to study the stars and try to reason out what changes the New World's discovery forced in the science of navigation. "In the endeavor to ascertain longitude I have lost much sleep," said Amerigo, "and have shortened my life ten years, but I hold it well worth the cost. . . ." Columbus, the intuitive, estimated the speed of his ships by his heartbeats. Amerigo, the practical, calculated how far he had sailed by astronomy.

Vespucci anchored in a Brazilian harbor on Aug. 17, 1499, after a fight with natives that left his men "grievously wounded and weary." He remained in harbor until Sept. 5, 1499. There, by a brilliant calculation based on the distance between the moon and Mars ("lunar distance"), he evolved a way of learning where he was and how far he had traveled.

Said Captain James Cook two centuries later: "The method of lunar distance from the sun or stars is the most priceless discovery which the navigator ever could have made, and must render the memory of the first discoverer of this method immortal."

Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major is a careful, deliberate, warmly worshipful book that never quite makes the man for whom America was named a living human being, but does convincingly show him as one of the world's great pioneers.

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