Shedding Grace on Amerigo the Beautiful

Strange . .. that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville . .. whose highest naval rank was boatswain’s mate in an expedition that never sailed, managed to supplant Columbus and baptize half the world with his own dishonest name. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson didn’t know beans. --Dr. Putnam C. Kennedy

Dr. Putnam (Put) Kennedy is the last man in America you’d expect to make waves. Retired radiologist, doting grandfather, faithful Kiwanian; about as controversial as a Fred Astaire film. Methodical, soft-spoken, self-effacing. Partial to a good read. Mostly history.

In 1984, Put Kennedy is sitting in his favorite chair in the family room of his comfortable La Canada home. He is reading Daniel Boorstin’s “The Discoverers,” in which Boorstin quotes the plaint of “an eminent Latin-American historian,” to wit: “In this whole hemisphere, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, not one statue has been erected to (Amerigo Vespucci).”

Not the Leaping Kind

Kennedy does not leap from his chair. He is not the leaping kind. Rather, he lays aside his book and ponders the slight.

“Hundreds of millions of people call themselves ‘Americans,’ ” he said later. “How many billions of times a day is the word America invoked?

“But ask your neighbor, your children, your teacher. Everybody’s heard of Amerigo, of course, but how many people know why we’re Americans, instead of Columbians ?” For that matter, Ericssonians, or even Brendanians ?

“I was intrigued,” Kennedy said. Not disturbed. Not irate. Intrigued. “I thought maybe I might be able to do something about it . . . . “

Amerigo or bust.

By summer of 1987, thanks to Kennedy, there are not one but three busts of Amerigo Vespucci in the Western Hemisphere.

One, ironically, is in Colombia, a country named after You Know Who.

A second, more appropriately, looks out to sea from a park in Rio de Janeiro (discovered by Vespucci and named by him “River of January”).

The third bust (actually it was the first) graces the foyer of the library of a small college located in that celebrated cauldron of geopolitical controversy: Glendale.

There will be no more. When they made Amerigo Vespucci, they threw away the mold.

Columbus--a man who hungered after gold and glory, not necessarily in that order--would have reveled in a similar honor, be it Glendale or Gallipoli. Vespucci couldn’t have cared less.

By the early 1500s, the putative heydays of both old friends, Columbus--resentful, reviled, even brought back from Hispaniola in chains--was a bitter man, prematurely aged, broke, but still convinced (more likely, still convincing himself) that he had found the Indies.

Vespucci was still bopping along the East Coast of the Americas, darting down to Argentina, marveling at the stilted sea houses of Venezuela (which he named: “Little Venice”), even wintering in Florida, though he didn’t know it.

As a matter of fact, Vespucci never knew where he was; only that, contrary to all accepted dogma, there was this humongous land mass between Europe and Asia. Not India, not China, not Cipango (Japan). Call it “the Fourth Continent,” he said. Catchier yet, call it Mundus Novus --the New World.

Vespucci’s first two voyages (his last two were under the Portuguese flag) were in the vague capacity of “adviser,” reporting to King Ferdinand of Spain--vague because he’d been sent out to kind of keep tabs on old buddie Chris.

Columbus, while indisputably intrepid, was a rotten administrator. Native “Indians” were treated as slaves. (Vespucci: “Each one was lord of himself.”) Contentious colonizers had noses and ears cut off. As for crew, sailors who refused to sign a deposition that Cuba was not an island were relieved of their tongues.

Meanwhile, in a tiny monastery in western France, half a dozen monks and poets huddled over a new world map they were printing, considering what to call the new territory this guy Vespucci had chanced upon . . . .

Back in La Canada, Put Kennedy glides into action with all due deliberation. In a second-hand-book store, he locates “Amerigo and the New World” by German Arciniegas, head of the Academy of History in Bogota, Colombia. “It’s the definitive biography,” Kennedy says. “Of course, it’s the only biography.”

The dirty deal done Vespucci-- one of history’s truly forgotten men--continues to rankle in the breast of the good doctor.

Kennedy’s mission begins in 1985 with an approach to his own Glendale Kiwanis Club. The club suggests a joint venture with other clubs, “local, national, even in South America.”

One by one, the clubs reply with heartfelt apathy.

Kennedy writes his congressman (whose name the doctor won’t give, but you know who you are). A D.C. memorial, he’s told, involves a lot of red tape; i.e., forget it.

A mariners’ museum turns him down. So does the Huntington.

The idea of a statue in honor of the namesake of hundreds of millions, Kennedy is to discover, meets with--monumental indifference.

Discover is a tricky word, especially to the discoveree. The “Indians,” of course, were here long before the Spanish chose to misname them. Even Kennedy concedes that had the natives opted to paddle eastward, they would have discovered Europe.

As for which European first laid eyes on the New World, the stuffed buffalo is still up for grabs. In the Irish pubs of Santa Monica, late of a Saturday night, there are still those who hold with St. Brendan (AD 484-578), who, perhaps late of a Saturday night, is said to have sailed west to a “beautiful sacred island of unsurpassed fertility.”

Better documented is the claim of Leif Ericsson, son of Eric the Red. Eric, a disciple of the Viking Creed of “rape, pillage and burn,” found the Faeroe Islands by accident, no doubt while fleeing the fuzz; then found Iceland one dark and stormy night while aiming at the Faeroes; found Greenland while aiming at Iceland . . . but at least we’ve heard of him.

The man who really found America, according to Boorstin, was one Bjarni Herjolfsson, way back in 986. While looking for his father, who’d joined Eric’s Greenland Gang, Herjolfsson bumped full bore into North America. In the best Viking tradition, Herjolfsson took a couple of sniffs and went back to look for Pop. Herjolfsson, needless to say, never had a dinner.

Ericsson later established a colony, as did his sister, ax-wielding Freydis, but neither ranks very high in Kennedy’s pantheon, because “neither was really looking for America.”

Nor, it should be pointed out, was Columbus, who was looking for the Indies.

Nor, for that matter, was Vespucci, who wasn’t really looking for anything but who had the rare good sense to recognize it when he saw it.

“What it came down to was this,” Kennedy said: “Why don’t we have it (the monument) here?”

Mexican artist Armando Amaya was commissioned to sculpt a bust of Vespucci, and Glendale Community College accepted the $14,000 memento with alacrity. (Glendale, Kennedy points out with a twinkle, is not exactly provincial: “Our main highway, in fact, is named after an Israeli statesman.” Sure enough, four blocks from Kennedy’s house is an on-ramp marked Begin Freeway. . . . )

The Taylor Library alcove is indeed a lovely setting, if slightly confining even for the modest Kennedy ambition.

It was decided then, to have two more Amaya busts cast before destroying the mold. Placing them was not as easy. Patient but determined, Kennedy was reduced to the role of petitioner: “Hey, anybody out there want a free bust?”

Dr. Arciniegas’ Academy of History in Bogota finally accepted, in a formal ceremony. Rio reneged on an obvious site--the Avenue of the Americas--but provided a sandy suburban park, where a group of schoolchildren managed a chorus of Brazil’s national anthem between cloudbursts. The mayor was there, and the U.S. ambassador, but the entire ceremony rated only two inches in one local newspaper.

What it is about Vespucci is less apathy than ignorance.

“Pickle dealer?” Hardly. Vespucci was of an illustrious Florentine family of statesmen, philosophers, clergy, intermarried with the renowned Medici clan.

In Seville to oversee the business affairs of the Medici, he became a ship chandler as well. When offered the chance to indulge in a lifelong passion for navigation, Vespucci took to the king’s ships like Darwin to the Beagle, and with a mind equally open.

Columbus was freighted by contemporary superstition: “The southern regions have been made unfit for human habitation by God”; “The world is in the shape of a pear”; “Below the Azores, lice begin to die.”

Vespucci believed in stars to steer, ears to hear, eyes to engulf the wonders of the Novus Mundus and the pen to record them. His letters home to friends in Florence portray “lascivious women healthy as fish” who “could draw a bow like the men”; iguanas “horrid of aspect”; cannibals who “smoked human legs from the rafters” but “eat only their enemies . . . . “

More importantly, he described coastlines, longitudes and latitudes. As Arciniegas writes: “Amerigo brought the monarchs not parrots but a globe of the world.”

The letters were translated--Latin, German, Dutch, French--and inevitably fell into the hands of the ambitious friars of Saint Die, who were making their new map.

In Seville, a move was already under way--led in the main by ecclesiastics--to discredit Vespucci’s claims.

In Saint Die, Martin Waldseemuller was chief cartographer. Merry Matthias Ringmann, 22--son of peasants who reveled in the pure joy of world play--was charged with naming the new territories. Amerigo, the name of the letter writer, was a natural, but maybe a little hard-edged. America might be nice . . . .

Put Kennedy looks out onto his summer garden. “I’m not that great for fame,” he said. “I’m not looking for a Time cover.

“Here I am in my 70s, and I’ve been a good doctor, but I don’t have any accomplishments out of the ordinary, really.

“So I’ve had these statues made, and placed. Somebody will walk by, stop, wonder about Amerigo, maybe pursue it a little further.

“And even if nobody knows it was I who was responsible, I’ll know that I’ve done it. Done something special.”