an exciting mental adventure to follow the mind of a man who per-
ceived the most important fact of his generation before it was seen
by anyone else.

The Vespuccian controversy has had a dramatic history. Mundus
Novus and the Four Voyages (so-called Soderini Letter) were pub-
lished in 1504, both purporting to have been written by Vespucci,
and both of them were forgeries. The "first" of the four voyages,
dated 1497, gave Vespucci priority of one year over Columbus on
the coast of South America and also made him the first explorer of
the coastline of Central America, Mexico, and the southeastern coast
of the United States.

In 1507 Waldseemüller first used the name "America" for the
continent of South America, and in 1538 Mercator applied that
name to the northern continent. In the middle of the sixteenth cen-
tury Las Casas attacked Vespucci on legalistic grounds that Colum-
bus had priority, and in 1601 Herrera, accepting the forgeries as
genuine, accused Vespucci of falsifying the dates of his voyages.

The three Vespucci letters from Seville, 1500, Cape Verde, 1501,
and Lisbon, 1502, were first published as apocryphal, the Seville
letter in 1745, the Lisbon letter in 1789, and the Cape Verde letter
in 1827.

In 1846 Lester and Foster, in the first biography of Vespucci in
English, accepted two of the genuine letters and at the same time
uncritically retained the Four Voyages. M. F. Force, in 1879, was
the first to suggest that the Four Voyages might be a forgery. In
1895 Harrisse wrote: "The four voyages of Americus Vespuccius
across the Ocean remain the enigma of the early history of Amer-
ica."

In 1900 Gallois cleared Vespucci of having had anything to do
with Waldseemiiller's naming of America. The next year Uzielli
thought the errors in the Four Voyages were largely due to the
lack of an exact text of that narrative. Ober, in 1907, avoided tak-
ing sides in the controversy; he held the problem of the "first"
voyage to be insoluble on the basis of the Four Voyages; he quoted
extensively from it, however, as source material. He quoted also
from the Seville and Lisbon letters, and he defended Vespucci's
character against the logical consequences of the contradictions he
had admitted.

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