This middle-aged, shrewd-looking individual had for half his life been chained to the desk, for he had been many years a clerk in the great merchant houses of the Medici.  Until he was forty years old he had hardly gone outside his native city.  In the latter half of the fifteenth century each Italian city was a little world in itself, with its own standards, customs and traditions.  The fact that Vespucci spent most of his leisure and all of his spare ducats in the collection and study of maps and globes and works on geography, was regarded as a proof of mild insanity.  When he paid one hundred and thirty gold pieces for a particularly fine map made by Valsequa in 1439, even his intimate friend Soderini called him a fool.  Vespucci was himself an expert mapmaker.  This may have been a reason why, about 1490, the Medici sent him to Barcelona to look after their interests in Spain.  In Seville he secured a position as manager in the house of Juanoto Berardi, who fitted out ships for Atlantic voyages.  In 1497 he himself sailed for the newly discovered islands of the West, and spent more than a year in exploration.  This taste of travel seemed to have whetted his appetite for more, for he was now acting as astronomer and geographer in the expedition which Ojeda had organized and Juan de la Cosa fitted out, to the coast which Colon had discovered and called Tierre Firme.  In the seven years since the first voyage of the great Admiral it had become the custom to have on board, for expeditions of discovery, a person who understood astronomy, the use of the astrolabe and navigation in general, and the making of charts and maps.  Vespucci was exactly that sort of man.  However queer it might seem to the young Ojeda to find in a clerk forty years old such a fresh and youthful delight in travel, both he and La Cosa knew that they had in him a valuable assistant.  It was generally understood that he meant to write a book about it all.

Vespucci was in fact thinking of his future book when he made that speech about translators.  He was planning to write the book not in Latin, as was usual, but in Italian, making if necessary another copy in Latin.

The party had sailed from Puerto Santa Maria on May 20, 1499, taking with them a chart which Bishop Fonseca, head of the Department of the Indies, furnished.  It had been the understanding when Colon received the title of Admiral of the Indies that no expedition should be sent out without his authority.  This understanding Fonseca succeeded in persuading the King and Queen to take back, and another order was issued, to the effect that no independent expedition was to go out without the royal permission.  This, practically, meant Fonseca’s leave.  The Bishop signed the permit for Ojeda’s undertaking with double satisfaction.  He was doing a favor for his friend, Bishop Ojeda, cousin to this young man, and he was aiming a blow at the hated Genoese Admiral, whose very chart he was turning over to the young explorer.