Between Vespucci and Columbus a cordial and mutual friendship existed, and the Florentine pilot had no wish nor thought of taking away from the Genoese admiral any part of the honor and gratitude due to him. Both sailed in the service of Spain, but Vespucci also made two voyages for Portugal. It was a Latin book by a German geographer, Waldseemüller, published in the little college town of St. Dié, in a valley of the Vosges mountains in northeastern France, April 25, 1507, which first proposed the name America for the region described by Vespucci south of the equator. There was at that time no intention to include under it the countries farther north discovered and explored by Columbus, Cabot, and other navigators. Winsor and Fiske have traced very instructively the growth of European knowledge of the New World, whereby it was finally learned that all the coasts explored from Labrador to the strait of Magellan are connected parts of one vast continent, on which Mercator bestowed the single name America in 1541, twenty-nine years after Vespucci’s death. Succeeding generations long imputed blame to Vespucci for this supplanting of Columbus in the name of the new continent; but either would have scorned to wrong the other, or to falsify or exaggerate intentionally in the narrations of their voyages. The personal honor of Vespucci has been vindicated by the researches of Alexander Humboldt and the Brazilian historian, Varnhagen; and the latter, in 1865 and 1869, well ascertained that Vespucci’s first voyage, made in 1497–98, concerning which much doubt and misunderstanding remained because of the lack of many details in the narration, was the source of the first mapping of Yucatan, the Gulf of Mexico, and Florida. In Vespucci’s chart of that very early date the Mississippi river was unmistakably delineated, with a three-mouthed delta projecting into the Gulf. Varnhagen’s luminous researches, published between thirty and forty years ago, were brought more fully to the attention of readers of our English language by Hubert Howe Bancroft in 1883 (_Central America_, vol. I, pp. 99–107), and especially by John Fiske’s work, _The Discovery of America_, published in 1892. No official reports nor chart of Vespucci’s first voyage, which was probably under the commandership of Pinzon and Solis, are preserved; but two very early maps, evidently drafted in part from the chart of that expedition, still exist, and were essentially reproduced ten years ago by Harrisse, Winsor, and Fiske, in their elaborate discussions of the Columbian and later discoveries.