His first name is known to the world, but who knows his name? And his story? Why, how did Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) end up being assigned this fourth continent that Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) had "discovered" - without knowing it?
Combining interviews and historical reconstructions, Eike Schmitz takes us on the trail of this explorer who could have remained anonymous, like so many others at the time of the "great discoveries". Too bad we have to wait until the end of his documentary to understand why America is called "America" and not "Colombia".
Surprising to see how a character so little known to the greatest number of people was able to arouse so much analysis and controversy. Until Stefan Zweig, who, in 1941, made the biography of Vespucci in an attempt to unravel the threads of a complex story. That of a historical "error", and not the least: attributing the name to the New World of an explorer who had discovered nothing - except that it was indeed a real great discovery of Columbus. He will in fact be the first to say that what the latter approached, in 1492, "is not an island, but a continent". A Mundus novus, title of the book that Vespucci wrote in Latin in 1503. In the 19th century, German scholars made him an impostor, casting doubt on the very existence of his expeditions.
The young Amerigo, from a noble and rich Florentine family, was passionate about geography from childhood. He entered the service of the all-powerful Medici, who sent him to Seville in 1491 to supervise their affairs. He who dreams of seeing the world "rejoices to finally have the opportunity", says the voiceover. The shipowner for whom he works makes him his testamentary executor, responsible for recovering the debt contracted by the Genoese navigator, who has returned rich in glory but poor in goods and gold. But Vespucci "befriended Columbus and dreams of emulating him."
An unknown constellation
He embarked in his turn, in 1499. He took the southern route, in the hope of finding the passage to the Indies that the great "admiral of the sea Océane" was still looking for. Having crossed the equator, he notices that the North Star has disappeared, discovers in the firmament an unknown constellation, the Southern Cross. The first European to land at the mouth of the Amazon, Vespucci notes everything he sees, "in this literary tradition that exoticizes the American continent," laments Karen Lisboa, a historian in Rio de Janeiro. The Renaissance intellectual "composes his text in the epistolary style of antiquity", relativizes Robert Wallisch, of the Vienna Academy of Sciences.
In 1507, in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, where the Duke of Lorraine sponsors a research center, cartographers anxious to update the geography of the planet - established by Ptolemy around the year 150 - seek a name to designate this fourth continent: it will be "America". The United States will buy the only remaining copy of this planisphere in 2021, for 10 million dollars (8.9 million euros).
As for Amerigo Vespucci, no one will ever know if he knew - and approved -, five years before his death, that his first name had been given to America. Only certainty, he had become, at the time, more famous than his prestigious elder Christopher Columbus. A quarter of an hour of glory that will have fizzled out.
