Felipe Fernandez-Armesto · 2007 · sea

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's life of the man two continents are named after, and an attempt to work out what he actually did. A Medici bank clerk who talked his way onto a ship, wrote letters that outsold every other account of the New World, and was rewarded by a German mapmaker who had never met him.

1. 1
   Florence

   A younger son in the Vespucci house on the Ognissanti, educated by an uncle and set to work for the Medici - not a navigator, not a captain, and by any reasonable measure not qualified for what happens next.

2. 2
   Seville

   The Medici bank's agent in Andalusia, outfitting ships for the Indies - including, in 1496, one of Columbus's - and hearing at first hand every rumour arriving from the west.

3. 3
   Cadiz

   1499, and the first voyage that can be reasonably documented, under Alonso de Ojeda - Vespucci aboard in some capacity that the sources cannot agree on, which is the problem with his entire career.

4. 4
   The Amazon

   The mouth of a river so large it freshens the sea for miles offshore - and a coast running west that ought not to exist if this is Asia, which is the observation the whole reputation rests on.

5. 5
   Cabo de Santo Agostinho

   The Brazilian bulge, and the 1501 Portuguese voyage south along a coastline that keeps going - two thousand miles of it, far past anywhere Ptolemy allowed for.

6. 6
   Rio de la Plata

   Fifty degrees south by some accounts, into cold water and long nights - the evidence that this is not the eastern edge of Asia but something else entirely, which Vespucci was the first to say in print.

7. 7
   Lisbon

   The letters home, printed and reprinted across Europe in dozens of editions - some of them almost certainly not his, and all of them read by people who had never heard of Columbus.

8. 8
   Saint-Die

   A small town in the Vosges, and a printer's workshop where in 1507 a cosmographer called Waldseemuller draws a new map and labels the southern landmass America, after Amerigo - and later regrets it.

9. 9
   Seville

   Pilot-major of Spain from 1508, examining navigators and maintaining the master chart - a Florentine clerk who ended in charge of the empire's cartography, and died of malaria four years later.