The solution of the difficulty relied upon by Humboldt and others seems, therefore, insufficient; it is not explained by assuming that the date 1497 in the narrative of the first voyage was the careless blunder of the translator, copyist, or printer of Vespucci’s original letter. It is not an error if there were four voyages; for as the date of the last one is undisputed, the date of 1497 for the first one must remain to give time enough for the whole. But that there were four voyages does not depend solely upon the date given to the first one. That there were four—“quatuor navigationes”—is asserted repeatedly by Vespucci in the different letters. In the relation of the first one, wherein is given this troublesome date which has so vexed the souls of scholars, he says at some length that as he had seen on these “twice two” voyages so many strange things, differing so much from the manners and customs of his own country, he had written a little book, not yet published, to be called “Four Expeditions, or Four Voyages,” in which he had related, to the best of his ability, about all he had seen.[461] If, then, the date 1497 is to be explained away as the result of carelessness or accident,—even admitting that such an explanation would explain,—what is to be done with this passage? It cannot, like a single numeral—a 7 for a 9—be attributed to chance; and it becomes necessary, therefore, to regard it as an interpolation contrived to sustain a clumsy falsification of date. It has also been conjectured that two of the letters have been misapprehended; that Vespucci meant one as only a continuation of the other in a description of a single voyage, or if intended as two letters, they were meant to describe the same voyage. The early editors, it has been suggested, supposing that each letter described a separate voyage, forged or changed the dates in accordance with that supposition. If there were no other objection to this theory, it is untenable if what has just been said be true. The duration of each voyage, the aggregate length of the whole, and the distinct and careful assertion that there were four of them, require that there should be one prior to that which Vespucci calls his second. All this leads, according to our present knowledge of the facts, inevitably to this conclusion,—whether Vespucci himself wrote, or others wrote for him, these letters, their very consistency of dates and of circumstantial assertion show them to have been deliberately composed to establish a falsehood. For the researches of Muñoz and of Navarrete, as is said above, prove that Vespucci could not have sailed from Spain on his first voyage on the 10th or 20th of May, 1497; for from the middle of April of that year to the end of May, 1498, he was busily employed at Seville and San Lucar in fitting out the fleet for the third expedition of Columbus.