After a few months Mr. Brown raised the delicate question of rent. The indignant stranger instantly had the matter brought to the notice of the law, which, invoked in this way, reproved Mr. Brown for "profiteering" and assessed the rent at 8s. a week. Mr. Brown had, after the manner of his kind, no sort of documentary evidence that he had been offered 12s. The stranger has never paid any rent at all, and has announced that he is a Communist. This does not prevent his letting one room in Mr. Brown's house for 10s. a week.

Mr. Brown regards his investment now as a bad debt. He might succeed in turning out his inconvenient tenant if he went to law, or he might not; he prefers not to try.

Who would have thought that all these well-meant laws to give the poor man a house would have produced such tangles with such repercussions on the poor man himself? But so it is. Who would have thought that taxation would have brought the "gentry" to live in workmen's cottages? But it has, and there they are.

And something of the same kind is happening about land, for land cannot now safely be let for market gardening, the law giving the tenant a fixed holding; so that, unless the market gardener can buy, he cannot easily get land, and the lovely plan by which he could permanently acquire someone else's land for a rental and without having to buy it does not help him as was thought, and a lot of land in our neighbourhood is thereby not put to its best use.

There are a lot more things that puzzle and disturb us down here. We do not understand the working of the dole nor of parish relief. The two can be given at once, it appears. The latter is, we know, given to families earning very high wages, and we think our money should be more carefully spent.

We are also very dissatisfied with education, believing that what is taught in our local elementary schools is utterly unfitted for our-or indeed any-children. We observe that when evening continuation classes are given, even in our purely agricultural parishes, that agriculture is not referred to. The courses are only suited to clerks and commercial travellers. We also see our clergy being edged out of the Church schools, and our schoolmasters with double the salary of the clergy but minus their aspirates. We see a general decay of rustic skill and, more serious, of family life, except among people of very determined character. The remedy for some of these troubles is in our own hands, if we knew how to use our powers, but we get entangled

with generalities and lose sight of the trees for looking at the wood.

The great theories of political parties roll over our heads, but when the theory turns into law, we groan under the disabilities imposed upon us, and when election-time comes round we are once more confounded and bewildered by conflicting offers of which we cannot judge. We see the injustice perpetrated, but we do not always see the perpetrator. And recent changes in the name of progress very often seem to us unwanted and wasteful. We should like to return to a stability which we have lost; to have village schools that would fit our children for life without the inordinate modern extravagances; to have the security of our own property and of our own jobs, not the perpetual flux of uncertainty. Is this impossible? In Blankshire we cannot think so. But our voice does not carry as far as London, and we have no knowledge of the great world of politics to tell us how to bring our grievances to the ears of those in power.

A COUNTRY COUSIN

VOL. LXXXVII

THE FIRST VOYAGE OF AMERIGO
VESPUCCI, 1497

THERE has been, perhaps, no controversy carried on more bitterly than that regarding the Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, whose memory will pass down the ages in the name of the great western continent. Honoured in life, and dying holding the highest maritime post in Spain, at that time the most powerful seafaring nation of the world, he was barely interred before he was accused of deliberately filching a continent from its discoverer, and giving it his own name. For centuries he was branded as a thief; now, although through the strenuous efforts of his defenders that accusation has been successfully refuted, he is none the less accused, and generally held guilty, of fraudulently inventing the voyage upon which his title rests.

Amerigo Vespucci, the third son of Anastasio Vespucci, was born on March 9, 1451, at Florence, of which city his father was a notary. His education was carried out under the charge of his uncle, Fra Giorgio, an ardent supporter of Savonarola, and embraced Latin and the sciences of mathematics and astronomy. A fellow student was Piero Soderini, who afterwards rose to be Gonfaloniere of Florence during the Medici's ten years' exile.

Vespucci entered the service of the mercantile house of the Medici, and in 1492 was engaged for them in Cadiz, where he yet remained in 1495. Two years later, in May 1497, he went to sea with four ships, returning to Cadiz in October the following year, having, according to his own account, discovered upwards of 850 leagues of coast. On May 16th of the following year he sailed as pilot in Ojeda's expedition to the shores of South America, and, on his return, after a short sojourn in Seville, he went to Portugal. Here he took service for the King, and engaged in two voyages towards the south-west. On the first of these he attained the highest southern latitude to that time, 52° S.

In 1504 he left the service of Portugal and returned to Spain, paying a visit to Columbus at Seville as he passed through on his way to Madrid. The great Admiral entrusted to his care a letter to his son, who was then pleading his cause at Court, in which he speaks of Vespucci in high terms: "The bearer of this letter. . . is a very respectable

man.

Fortune has been adverse to him, as to many others.

His labours have not been so profitable to him as he might have expected." Amerigo seems to have been well received at Court, being given his naturalization papers in April 1505. Three years later he received the crowning honour of his life, being on April 6, 1508, appointed Piloto Mayor or Chief Pilot of Spain, with a yearly salary of 75,000 maravedis. He held this appointment, residing in Seville, until his death in February 1512. Such in short was the life and career of the "pickle dealer of Seville," as Emerson scathingly calls him.

It is unfortunate that the only authority we have for his voyages are Vespucci's own writings. The chief of these is that known as the "Soderini Letter," containing an account of his four voyages written from Lisbon in 1504 to his old schoolmate Piero Soderini, then at the height of his power in Florence. The remainder consist of four letters to Lorenzo de Medici, dated 1500, 1501, and 1502, one of which is considered spurious, and the famous "Mundus Novus" letter of 1503, which eventually led to Amerigo's name being given to the continent.

Means of publicity in the dawn of the sixteenth century were small, and few of the volumes now in our libraries were prepared for the printer by the hand of the author. The usual custom was for the explorer to write a letter to the King on his arrival home reporting the chief incidents of his voyage, and then to have this original copied, and sent to various interested monarchs and influential men throughout Europe, simply changing the dedication at the commencement. It is unlikely that the author read through all the copies made by his secretary or clerks, and thus arose the first opportunity for mistakes. One of these copies, or perhaps even the copy of a copy, was given by its recipient to the printer, whose careless, and often halfeducated, compositor set it up in type, and issued to the world a volume containing his own blunders added to the copyists' interpolations and errors, fresh editions perpetuating and, in all probability, adding to them. These facts were not taken into account by the critic of bygone days, who simply concerned himself with the volume before him. It is only in recent times that the comparison of various editions of the same work has been undertaken, and an attempt made to trace the book back to its original text, thus making true criticism possible.

The Soderini Letter, on which Vespucci's reputation rests, has come down to us in three different versions: (1) Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci della isola nuouamente trouate in

quattro suoi viaggi, printed at Florence about 1506, a barbarous and ungrammatical Hispano-Italian jargon; (2) a Latin translation inserted at the end of Waldseemuller's Cosmographiae Introductio, printed at St. Die, Lorraine, 1507; and (3) an Italian manuscript entitled Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci a Piero Soderini, Gonfaloniere, L'anno, 1504, now in the Magliabechiana Library, Florence. These three, although they all spring from the same original, are more or less at variance with each other.

In the past critics of Vespucci have considered only one, or at the most two, of these texts, so their criticism has been of necessity incomplete. To quote simply two instances: while Varnhagen made use of the Florentine print and the St. Die Latin edition, Las Casas knew of the Latin version alone. The need of a critical text which can be reasonably assumed to reproduce Vespucci's original has been felt by scholars for over a century. Such a text has at last been given us by Professor G. T. Northup in Vol. IV, Vespucci Reprints, Texts and Studies, of the Princeton University Press, N.J. (1916). It is an invaluable work, being a translation of the three texts, collated and used to correct each other, and constitutes the greatest step yet taken towards the solution of the Vespucci problem.

The author clearly proves the genealogy of the three versions and their relation to each other. He shows that the Florentine print and the Italian manuscript, descending from the same original as the Latin print, fall into a separate sub-division, and that the Latin print is not, as has been previously assumed, a translation of the Florentine, but of a French version, which was itself a translation. This translation of a translation, that had already descended through two, or possibly more, copies, cannot be regarded as accurate. The Italian manuscript is a fairly modern copy of one made in 1505 by Piero Choralmi da Dicomano, Florentine Notary, "To oblige their Magnificences Girolamo di Nofri del Caccia and Baldino Troscia," which had itself had several ancestors. The Florentine print has a similar line of descent, probably through the same ancestors. No one of the present texts can therefore be regarded as faithfully reproducing the letter as originally written by Vespucci, and, as said above, none are in absolute harmony.

Much has been written of Vespucci's illiterate style, and this point has also been cleared up by Professor Northup. He shows by conclusive evidence that Vespucci wrote his letter in good Spanish, and this was transliterated -not translated, as this word cannot be used for the method