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appointed chief pilot of Spain and died burdened with honours in Seville in 1512.
    Version two describes a very different man. This Vespucci was a wheeler-dealer, a promoter and entrepreneur rather than a great explorer. The sole voyage to the Americas that historians can be certain he made was as part of an expedition led by Alonso de Hojeda, whose name haspassed completely out of history. The other claimed voyages are pure imagination. He claimed to have come within 13° of the south pole and to have reached geographical co-ordinates located in British Columbia on the west coast of Canada, both somewhat improbable. His letters were appreciated more for their description of the sensual proclivities of the natives than for any scholarly value, and naming continents after Vespucci rather than Columbus is a nonsense.
    Arguing the merits of the various versions of Vespucci’s life is good sport for historians, the majority of whom probably now accept that Vespucci did make a number of voyages and was more than a simple con man. Whether he was the first to reach the American mainland, however, is still doubtful. The strongest candidate for that honour is neither Vespucci nor Columbus but yet another Italian. The Venetian John Cabot, sailing in the service of the English King Henry VII, reached the mainland on 24 June 1497. Like Columbus he was sure he had found the coast of Asia. The following year he sailed west again, confident that he would soon be landing in Japan; he was never seen again.
    Although Cabot certainly touched the soil of the New World, even he may not have been the first European since the Vikings to do so. In 1472, twenty years before Columbus, two Scandinavians named Dietrich Pining and Hans Pothorst reached the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland and may well have stepped ashore on the same coastline that Bjarni Herjolsson the travelling salesman had reached 500 years before. They were searching for a north-west route to Asia, and had they realised what they had stumbled upon, and broadcast their exploits as effectively as Vespucci, the new continent might have been named after the captain of their expedition, a Portuguese mariner named Joäo Vaz Corte Real. At a stroke Americans could have become Realists.
    Whatever the truth about Vespucci the name America stuck, and Spanish adventurers followed rapidly in the wake of Columbus and his comrades. With just a few men the early conquistadors destroyed the vast empires of the Incas and Aztecs with amazing speed, slaughtering thousands in their pursuit of gold. As their name implies these conquistadors setout to conquer. Their ideology was no secret: to them the New World offered people to subjugate, gold to loot and land to steal. In 1533, the year Ivan the Terrible came to the throne, Pizarro completed the conquest of the Inca empire. By the time the first Romanov ascended the Russian throne eighty years later permanent Spanish, French and English settlements on the North American mainland were established in Florida, Quebec and Virginia.
    The passage west did not, as Columbus had promised, provide a back door through which to strike at Islam, but the Spanish took equal exception to the religious customs of their native opponents. The Inca priests had a particularly nasty way of dealing with those who displeased them. The unfortunates were taken, possibly after being drugged, to altars high above the congregation. There the high priests slashed their chests and pulled out the still beating hearts to appease the Inca gods. The Spanish were shocked by such barbarism. Spanish priests preferred to torture those who displeased them, then tie them to a stake, surround it with logs and set the unfortunates ablaze. This, they believed, would appease the Spanish god. To their victims there was probably little to choose between the two forms of execution, but to history one is human sacrifice, the most unforgivable of abominations, while the other is the Spanish