When Amerigo Vespucci was a young boy, his happiest moments were spent studying the stars. He excelled in mathematics. His hobby was copying maps, and his greatest desire was to travel—to see—to know. Yet in spite of this excellent background for a career of navigation and exploring, he spent half of his life as a businessman—first accompanying his uncle, a successful Florentine merchant, on buying and selling trips through Europe, then managing the affairs of two sons of the famous Medici family, and later as an independent merchant in Seville. It was no until he was well on in his forties that he made his first voyage, which was to prove the beginning of the career for which he was so well equipped.
Amerigo devoted the next several years of his life to exploration. He was not the first to see the new continent which was later to be named for him, but he was the first to know that it was new—that it was not Asia, as Columbus reported—but a New World!
In this sparkling biography, Nina Brown Baker brings Amerigo Vespucci into fine focus—an explorer who did not seek treasures or fame or material reward but, endowed with the curiosity of a true scholar and a talent for correlating his observations, changed the map of the world, and opened the seas to safer and more fruitful exploration for all who came after him.
—from the dust jacket
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