If, in the foregoing narrative, the author has seemed to champion his hero unduly, going perhaps unnecessarily into the details of his voyages, it may have been owing to anticipated opposition on the part of his readers. There has always been a wide divergence of opinion respecting the merits of Amerigo Vespucci, and the world has never reconciled itself to his so-called usurpation of the glory rightly belonging to Columbus. Even so great a writer as Emerson allowed himself to say: "Strange that broad America must wear the name of a thief! Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, who went out in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate, in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus, and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name!" We, who have followed the career of Amerigo Vespucci from its beginning to its ending, know that he was not a thief; that--except by implication, as having been a purveyor of naval stores--he was not a "pickle-dealer"; that he held a far higher rank than boatswain's mate--as attested by the royal proclamation we have cited, naming him to be chief pilot of Spain; and that, so far as the evidence of his contemporaries and his own letters show, he made no attempt whatever to thrust his personality upon the world. He did not "baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name," though it is true that the appellation by which a hemisphere is known to-day was derived from Americus, Amerigo, or Americo--whether we speak it in Latin, in Italian, or in Spanish. How comes it then, the reader may well ask, that America derived its name from the Florentine, Vespucci, when it should, by right of "discovery," have been called after the Genoese, Columbus? The answer to this question involves the following of clews centuries old, through a labyrinth of falsehood and misstatement that was built up three hundred years ago. The first clew may be found on page 197 of this biography, where mention is made of the translation of Vespucci's letter to Lorenzo de Medici, by Giocondo, in 1504, and issued by him under the title _Mundus Novus_. This letter is said to have been first published in Lisbon and Augsburg in 1504, and in Strasburg in 1505.