1. Name___________________
South America and Its People by Amerigo Vespucci
OVERVIEW
Amerigo Vespucci’s exploration of the coast of Brazil in 1502 included a visit with a group of
native South Americans. Here are excerpts of Vespucci’s account of South America and its
people.
This land is very pleasing, full of an infinite number of very tall trees which never
lose their leaves and throughout the year are fragrant with the sweetest aromas
and yield an endless supply of fruits, many of which are good to taste and
conducive to bodily health. The fields produce many herbs and flowers and most
delicious and wholesome roots. Sometimes I was so wonderstruck by the fragrant
smells of the herbs and flowers and the savor of the fruits and the roots that I
fancied myself near the Terrestrial Paradise. What shall we say of the multitude of
birds and their plumes and colors and singing and their numbers and their beauty?
I am unwilling to enlarge upon this description, because I doubt if I would be
believed.
What should I tell of the multitude of wild animals, the abundance of pumas,
of panthers, of wild cats, not like those of Spain, but of the antipodes; of so many
wolves, red deer, monkeys, and felines, marmosets of many kinds, and many
large snakes? We saw so many other animals that I believe so many species could
not have entered Noah’s ark. We saw many wild hogs, wild goats, stags and does,
hares, and rabbits, but of domestic animals, not one. Let us come to rational
animals. We found the whole land inhabited by people entirely naked, the men
like the women without any covering of their shame. Their bodies are very agile
and well proportioned, of light color, with long hair, and little or no beard. I
strove a great deal to understand their conduct and customs.
For twenty-seven days I ate and slept among them, and what I learned about
them is as follows. Having no laws and no religious faith, they live according to
nature. They understand nothing of the immortality of the soul. There is no
possession of private property among them, for everything is in common. They
have no boundaries of kingdom or province. They have no king, nor do they obey
anyone. Each one is his own master. There is no administration of justice, which
is unnecessary to them, because in their code no one rules. They live in communal
dwellings, built in the fashion of very large cabins. For people who have no iron
or indeed any metal, one can call their cabins truly miraculous houses. For I have
seen habitations which are two hundred and twenty paces long and thirty wide,
ingeniously fabricated; and in one of these houses dwelt five or six hundred
persons. They sleep in nets woven out of cotton, going to bed in mid-air with no
other cover.
They eat squatting upon the ground. Their food is very good: an endless
quantity of fish; a great abundance of sour cherries, shrimps, oysters, lobsters,
crabs and many other products of the sea. The meat which they eat most usually is
what one may call human flesh à la mode. When they can get it, they eat other
meat, of animals or birds, but they do not lay hold of many, for they have no dogs,
and the country is a very thick jungle full of ferocious wild beasts. For this reason
they are not wont to penetrate the jungle except in large parties. The men have a
custom of piercing their lips and cheeks and setting in these perforations
ornaments of bone or stone; and do not suppose them small ones. Most of them
have at least three holes, and some seven, and some nine, in which they set
1. Summary 2. Surprise 3. Small picture

2. ornaments of green and white alabaster, half a palm in length and as thick as a
Catalonian plum. This pagan custom is beyond description.
They say they do this to make themselves look more fierce. In short, it is a
brutal business.…
Their women do not make any ceremony over childbirth, as do ours, but they
eat all kinds of food, and wash themselves up to the very time of delivery, and
scarcely feel any pain in parturition. They are a people of great longevity, for
according to their way of attributing issue, they had known many men who had
four generations of descendants. They do not know how to compute time in days,
months, and years, but reckon time by lunar months. When they wished to
demonstrate something involving time, they did it by placing pebbles, one for
each lunar month. I found a man of advanced age who indicated to me with
pebbles that he had seen seventeen hundred lunar months, which I judged to be a
hundred and thirty-two years, counting thirteen moons to the year.
They are also a warlike people and very cruel to their own kind. All their
weapons and the blows they strike are, as Petrarch says, 'committed to the wind',
for they use bows and arrows, darts, and stones. They use no shields for the body,
but go into battle naked. They have no discipline in the conduct of their wars,
except that they do what their old men advise. When they fight, they slaughter
mercilessly.…
Those whom they seize as prisoners, they take for slaves to their habitations.…
We purchased from them ten creatures, male as well as female, which they were
deliberating upon for [human] sacrifice, or better to say, the crime. Much as we
reproved them, I do not know that they amended themselves. That which made
me the more astonished at their wars and cruelty was that I could not understand
from them why they made war upon each other, considering that they held no
private property or sovereignty of empire and kingdoms and did not know any
such thing as lust for possession, that is, pillaging or a desire to rule, which appear
to me to be the causes of wars and of every disorderly act. When we requested
them to state the cause, they did not know how to give any other cause than that
this curse upon them began in ancient times and they sought to avenge the deaths
of their forefathers.
Label this map of the Americas by
areas conquered by Spain, Portugal,
England and France