Word: vespucci
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...AMERIGO VESPUCCI, PILOT MAJOR-Frederick J. Pohl-Columbia University Press...
...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...
...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...