A seeming confirmation of this voyage is found in the map Juan de la Cosa made, in the year 1500, after he had been in company with Ojeda and Vespucci to the coast of pearls. He was with Columbus, in 1494, when the Admiral forced all his men to swear that Cuba was, to the best of their belief, part of the Asian continent. Yet, within six years, La Cosa depicts it on his map as an island--and that was before Ocampo had proved it one, by sailing around it, in 1508. It is thought that La Cosa obtained his information as to the insular character of Cuba from Vespucci, when they voyaged together on the coast of Terra Firma, which we now know as the northern shores of South America.
Admitting, still, the critics say, that Vespucci made the voyage he claimed, with Pinzon or with some one else, in 1497-1498, how does that affect the claim of Columbus? It does not affect it at all, for, though Vespucci may have discovered the continent a few months previous to his rival--and he never put forth the claim that he did so--Columbus, by his voyages of 1492 and 1493, led the way thither. If Vespucci, as some have asserted, claimed to have sailed in 1497, in order to establish a priority of discovery, he did it in a very bungling manner, and at a time when it might easily have been refuted, so many of his companions were then living. Besides, though his name was bestowed upon the newly discovered continent--perhaps as a consequence of the writing of this very letter--it was done without his knowledge and without the remotest suggestion of such a thing from him. This should be made clear: that Amerigo Vespucci had no thought of depriving his friend, Christopher Columbus, of a single leaf of his laurels, hard-won and well-deserved as he knew them to be.
There is no doubt whatever that Vespucci made a voyage in 1499-1500, along with Alonzo de Ojeda and the great pilot Juan de la Cosa, but whether this may be styled his first or his second must be left to the intelligence of the reader, for the historians are at odds themselves, and it might seem presumptuous in the biographer to assume to decide. This voyage was narrated by him in the following letter, written within a month of his return, to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de Medici, of Florence. It is dated, "Seville, July 18, 1500," and has been called by one of his countrymen "the oldest known writing of Amerigo relating to his voyages to the New World." Mr. John Fiske, in _The Discovery of America_, denounces this letter as a forgery; but why, and for what reason it should have been written by another, he does not state.