There seems to be no escape from this evidence, though it is so purely negative and circumstantial. But Humboldt, relying upon the researches of the Spanish historian Muñoz, and upon those gathered by Navarrete in his _Coleccion de los viages y descubrimientos_, presents the proof of an _alibi_ for Vespucci. As has been already said on a previous page, the fact is unquestioned that Vespucci, who had been a resident of Spain for some time, became in 1495 a member of the commercial house of Juanoto Berardi, at Seville, and that in January of the next year, as the public accounts show, he was paid a sum of money relative to a contract with Government which Berardi did not live to complete. The presumption is that he would not soon absent himself from his post of duty, where new and onerous responsibilities had been imposed upon him by the recent death of the senior partner of the house with which he was connected. But at any rate he is found there in the spring of 1497, Muñoz having ascertained that fact from the official records of expenses incurred in fitting out the ships for western expeditions, still preserved at Seville. Those records show that from the middle of April, 1497, to the end of May, 1498, Vespucci was busily engaged at Seville and San Lucar in the equipment of the fleet with which Columbus sailed on his third voyage. The _alibi_, therefore, is complete. Vespucci could not have been absent from Spain from May, 1497, to October, 1498,—the period of his alleged first voyage. All this seems incontrovertible, and should be accepted as conclusive till fresh researches among the archives of that age shall show, if that be possible, that those hitherto made have been either misunderstood or are incomplete. Assuming the negative to be proved, then, as to the alleged date of Vespucci’s first voyage, the positive evidence, on the other hand, is ample and unquestioned, that Columbus sailed from San Lucar on his third voyage on the 30th of May, 1498, and two months later reached the western continent about the Gulf of Paria. Was Vespucci then a charlatan? Was he guilty of acts so base as a falsification of dates, and narratives of pretended voyages, that he might secure for himself the fame that belonged to another,—that other, moreover, being his friend? There are reasons for believing this to be quite true of him; and other reasons for not believing it at all. There is not, to begin with, a scrap of original manuscript of his bearing on this point known to exist; it is not even positively known in what tongue his letters were written; and anything, therefore, like absolute proof as to what he said he did or did not do, is clearly impossible. The case has to be tried upon circumstantial evidence and as one of moral probabilities; and the verdict must needs differ according to the varying intelligence and disposition of different juries.