Amerigo Vespucci Tried to Sail to Melaka
THE AMERICAS are named after Amerigo Vespucci, a sailor and navigator born in Florence in 1451. The name ‘America’ famously first appears on a large 12-panel map drawn up by the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, a map explicitly based on Vespucci’s accounts. (The map’s full Latin title is Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes — ‘the Universal Cosmography according to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci and others’.) Waldseemüller simply took the Latin version of Amerigo’s given name, Americus, made it into a feminine noun, and applied it as an appellation for an entire continent (eventually two of them) (Figure 1).
This may be a little surprising, given that, as we all know, Columbus was the first European to establish a permanent settlement in the Americas. But by 1507 Columbus was out of favour, and it seemed to many in Europe — including, apparently, Waldseemüller — that Vespucci had ‘discovered’ the American mainland.
Vespucci is a controversial figure, in part because some questions remain regarding the veracity of his accounts (see Roukema 1962 for a sceptical look), and also because his writing is somewhat garbled. He undertook three or perhaps four voyages to the Americas; the most significant was probably his 1499 journey to what is now Brazil and Venezuela in the service of Spain, as this was the first time any Europeans had landed on the continent of South America. (The letter of Pêro Vaz de Caminha, written in 1500, is nonetheless the earliest surviving written account of any part of South America, as Vespucci wrote down his observations a little later on.)
Vespucci transferred his allegiance from Spain to Portugal in 1501, when he went on another voyage (his second or third). He sailed from Lisbon to Brazil, landing at and naming Bahia in 1502 and heading further on to what is now Rio de Janeiro. This voyage was reasonably successful and continued Portugal’s attempted settlement of South America, which had been promised to Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. On the depiction of AMERICA on the Waldseemüller map, a caption reads: Tota ista provincia inventa est per mandatum regis Castelle ‘All this newly discovered province is by law the King of Castile’s’.
All very interesting and consequential for the history of South America — but what does it have to do with Southeast Asia? Well, Vespucci’s stated aim for the following voyage in 1503, also financed by Portugal, was to reach the ‘island of Melaccha’ — that is to say, the city of Melaka in what is now Malaysia.
Melaka was a hugely important port and Islamic sultanate on the Malay Peninsula, appearing as such in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Arabic, Chinese, Malay, and Sundanese sources. For about a century the city dominated maritime trade in the eastern Indian Ocean. Vespucci’s mention of Melaka is a rare early appearance of the city in a European text.
The Soderini Letter (1504/5)
We know about Vespucci’s voyages principally through the letters he wrote. One such letter, written in Lisbon in 1504 and addressed to the Florentine statesman Piero Soderini, was printed in Italian in 1505 under the title Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi ‘Letter of Amerigo Vespucci on the islands newly discovered on four of his voyages’. A somewhat defective and considerably more popular Latin translation was printed in 1507. Very few copies of the original Italian printing survive — perhaps as few as five — but a copy in Princeton University Library was reprinted in facsimile in 1916, and one in the National Central Library of Florence (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze) has been digitised.
The letter is divided into sections recounting each of the four voyages. In the fourth and final part, Vespucci describes his ‘intention of going to discover an island towards the east, which is called Melaccha’. Vespucci’s plan was similar to that of Vasco da Gama, who travelled to India in 1498, and Pedro Álvares Cabral, who had stopped in Brazil, probably by accident, en route to India in 1500, in what was at that time the largest fleet of discovery ever sent out of Portugal. The then-standard idea was to head far out into the Atlantic to take advantage of powerful winds and currents that could carry the ships south of the Cape of Good Hope. From there they could easily get onto the Indian Ocean and sail across to India — and, indeed, eventually as far as Melaka.
I’ve transcribed and translated the relevant section of the letter here. The text is taken from the 1505 printing of Vespucci’s 1504 letter to Piero Soderini (Figure 3). There are no page numbers in the original incunable but, according to the page numbers in a facsimile made in 1916, this text appears on page 30.
The Text
REstami di dire le cose ꝑ me uiste nel quarto uiaggio, o gior-
nata:& perlo essere gia cansato, & etiam ꝑche q̃sto quarto
uiaggio nõ si forni, secõdo cħ io leuauo el ꝓposito / ꝑ una disgra-
tia che cí acchadde nel golfo del mare atlantico: come nel ꝓcesso
sotto breuira intẽdera V. M. mingegnero dessere bríeue. Parti-
mo di q̃sto porto di Lísbona 6. naus di cõserua cõ ꝓposito di an-
date a scoprire una isola uerso loríente, che sidíce Melaccha: del-
laquale si ha nuoue esser molto ríccha, & cħ e/ come elmagazíno
di tucte le naui che uẽgano del mare gangetíco & del mare índí-
co, come e/ Calís camera di tuttí en nauilí che passano da leuante
a ponẽte, & da ponẽte a leuãte ꝑ la uía dí Galígut: et q̃sta Me-
laccha e/ píu alloccídẽte cħ Galigut, & molto píu alta parte del
mezo dí: ꝑche sappíamo cħ sta ín paraggío dí 33. gradí del polo
antartíco. Partimo adí 10. di Maggío 1503 et fumo díríttí alle
Isole del cauo uerde, doue facẽmo nostro caragne, & píglíãmo
sorte dí rínfrescamẽto, doue stẽmo 13. gíorní: […]‘It remains for me to tell the things I saw on the fourth voyage or journey: and as I am already tired, and also because this fourth voyage did not succeed in accordance with my intentions, through a misfortune which happened in the gulf of the Atlantic Sea, as Your Magnificence shall learn shortly, I will endeavour to be brief. We departed from this port of Lisbon, six ships in company, with the intention of going to discover an island (1) towards the east, which is called Melaccha: of which there is news that it is very rich, and that it is, as it were, the storehouse of the ships which come from the Gangetic sea and from the Indian Sea from east to west, just as Cadiz is the waiting room of all the vessels which pass which pass from east to west, by the route of Galigut.(2) And this Melaccha is more westerly (3) than Galigut, and much further to the south, because we know that it lies at around 33 degrees of the antarctic hemisphere.(4) We departed on the tenth day of May 1503 and made directly for the isles of Cape Verde, where we did our careening, and took on various refreshments, where we stayed 13 days […].’
Notes
(1) We shouldn’t make too much of this ‘island’ thing; among Europeans, any exotic and poorly known place seems to have been thought of as an island at this point. Melaka is on the Eurasian mainland.
(2) Kozhikode in Kerala, India, formerly known as Calicut.
(3) Melaka is actually about 3,000 kilometres southeast of Kozhikode. This is a strange error.
(4) It’s nowhere near that far south; 33 degrees south is roughly the latitude of Uruguay and South Australia. Melaka is actually a little north of the equator.
How Did Vespucci Hear of Melaka?
Vespucci didn’t make it to Melaka in the end: after spending some time in Brazil, he realised that he didn’t have the men or equipment to proceed further. He helped construct a fort and loaded up on brazilwood (the American kind, Paubrasilia echinata), before returning to Lisbon, where he penned his letter to Soderini. But this leaves us with a question: How did Vespucci come to know of the existence of Melaka (Melaccha — Figure 5)?
Melaka was probably founded in around 1400, but it doesn’t appear by name in any European texts in the fifteenth century. We first see the city feature on European maps — specifically the Cantino planisphere, drawn in Portugal in 1502 (Figure 6) — after Vasco da Gama’s 1498 expedition; knowledge of the city’s existence was probably obtained then or during other Portuguese expeditions to India, like that of the aforementioned Cabral. This knowledge seems to have been acquired from speakers of Arabic, and the appearances of Melaka and Singapore on the Cantino Planisphere correspond neatly with what we find in, for example, works on navigation by the Omani sailor Aḥmad ibn Mājid (c.1432–1500). Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Melaka in 1511, and he hadn’t decide to attack it on a whim; by that time, tales of the city’s wealth had been circulating among the Portuguese for around a decade.
As it happened, it took until 1509 before a Portuguese expedition went beyond India and actually reached Southeast Asia. Melaka was visited in the interim by another Italian, Ludovico di Varthema, who took an entirely different route and travelled on local shipping, starting his Indian Ocean journey at Aden on the Arabian Peninsula — but that’s a different story, one more comparable to the slower journeys of Marco Polo and Niccolò de’ Conti than the long-distance Africa-rounding sea voyages of Vasco da Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral.
The Southeast Asia Blindspot
Why is all this interesting? Well, to me it’s interesting in its own right, but there’s a wider point I wish to highlight here, which is that Southeast Asia is often excluded from discussions of the Columbian Exchange and the so-called ‘age of discoveries’, even though it was a region of tremendous importance in motivating the (aggressive, imperialist, sometimes outright genocidal) European ‘discoveries’ and conquests of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
The Magellan-Elcano expedition (1519–1522), the first voyage around the world, was intended as a roundabout expedition to Maluku in eastern Indonesia, as was Francis Drake’s circumnavigation a few decades later. It’s well known that Columbus was trying to get to Asia, and more specifically to India and Southeast Asia, when he arrived in the Caribbean in 1492. After conquering Mexico in 1521, Hernán Cortés’s attempted to send a fleet to Maluku as well, something he ended up doing a few years later. Here’s what Fernando Cervantes says about this in his recent book on the Spanish conquistadores (2021:226–227):
‘… Cortés made the emperor [Charles V] an irresistible offer: “What I am proposing is to undertake the discovery of a route to the Spice Islands and any others, if there be any, between Maluco and Malaca and China.” […] Cortés made a solemn pledge to go to Spice Islands “either in person or to send such a fleet as will subdue those islands, settling them with Spaniards and constructing fortresses that are so well equipped with solid defences and artillery that no prince of those parts, or any other for that matter, will be capable of subduing them”.’
(I expect we’ll return to Cortés at a later date.)
The fact that the very man after whom the Americas were named attempted to sail to a city in Malaysia and ended up going to Brazil instead is an interesting tale that highlights the newly global aspect of this period in human history.
I would have thought that it would be well known because of this, but Southeast Asia is peculiarly neglected in this period. There’s a wonderful coffee table book on this period called Circa 1492 (Levenson 1991). It was published to accompany a 1991–2 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which marked the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. The book is over 600 pages long, lavishly decorated, and full of excellent concise articles covering, among other things, the history of Portuguese navigation, the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, ‘China in the Age of Columbus’, the Aztec gods, and western African sculpture c.1500. The catalogue is replete with beautiful photographs of works of art from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It’s a good book.
What it does not contain, however, is anything significant from or concerning Southeast Asia, mainland or maritime. There are no Javanese bronzes in the catalogue, even though some are held in museums that donated other pieces to the exhibition. None of the essays deal significantly with Banda or the Moluccas or with Melaka, Palembang, Sunda, Brunei, Ayutthaya, or Luzon. Spices are discussed in general terms, not linked with specific islands and origins. It’s a truly remarkable absence, an incredible lack — but also a typical example of the blindspot many historians seem to have when it comes to Southeast Asia. Circa 1492 is three decades old at this point, and I’d like to hope that things are better today, but based on my own experiences I can’t say that I have much faith that this is so.
I cannot explain this blindspot. I do not know why knowledge of Southeast Asian history and culture is so poorly distributed. People from other parts of the world seem to love going to Thailand and Bali on holiday, but it seems that that’s about it; the idea that it might be an interesting and important region in historical terms seldom seems to occur, even among scholars who ought to know better.
In any case, Vespucci’s is one of only a handful of appearances of Melaka in European texts or maps written or drawn before the Portuguese conquest in 1511. I have written a short companion to this piece on another early appearance — the brief caption describing Melaka on the Cantino planisphere. You can find it here.
This is yet another Patreon post that I have migrated here so that others might see it. It took more work than I had thought it would, but it’s an interesting story and it seems a shame to keep it permanently hidden away where only a few dozen paying subscribers can read it.
Dr. A. J. West — Leiden, 2022/Lisbon, 2023..
References
Cervantes, Fernando. 2021 [2020]. Conquistadores. A new history. London: Penguin Books.
Levenson, Jay A. (ed). 1991. Circa 1492. Art in the age of exploration. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Roukema, E. 1962. The mythical “first voyage” of the “Soderini letter”. Imago mundi. 16:70–75.
