Fernández-Armesto Felipe. Amerigo: the man who gave his name to America

Random House, Inc., New York. 2007.
eISBN: 978-0-307-51255-0.Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to America, was a pimp in his youth and a magus in his maturity. This astonishing transformation was part of his relentless self-reinvention, from which sprang a dazzling succession of career moves and what the celebrity press now calls makeovers.
From his late twenties or thereabouts, he began to refashion his identity with a regularity that suggests self-dissatisfaction and a need to escape. First he deserted the service of the ruler of Florence, his native city, for that of a rival. A few years later, in 1491, he abandoned Florence for Seville and turned from his previous business — which was as a commission agent, dealing mainly in jewels — to organizing fleets that supplied Columbus’s enterprise in the New World. In 1499, at the age of forty-five or so, Vespucci discovered a new vocation, taking to the ocean in person; and within a few more years, he had rebranded himself as an expert in navigation and cosmography. In the course of this last transformation, he shifted from Spanish to Portuguese service and back again. Notwithstanding his lack of qualifications and attainments, he was so convincing in his new role that he became a kind of official cosmographer, with a monopoly from the Castilian crown in the training of Atlantic pilots and the making of Atlantic charts. Some fellow experts hailed him as the new Ptolemy — a reincarnation of the greatest or, at least, the most influential geographer of antiquity. In the world of the Renaissance, there was no greater praise than to be acclaimed as the equal of the ancients.