finally caught sight of Sofala, the entrepôt of Monomatapa gold. He stayed in his ship, scouting the city from there, before setting sail back home alone. Conference at Bezeguiche On June 2, 1501, following up on the discovery of Brazil the previous year, King Manuel I of Portugal assembled a small exploratory expedition of three caravels under an unnamed Portuguese captain to explore and map the coast of Brazil. Aboard the ship was the Florentine cosmographer Amerigo Vespucci. The exact identity of the captain is uncertain. Some speculate it to have been the commander of the supply vessel that had delivered the news a year earlier (either Lemos or Gonçalves); others conjecture the commander went as a passenger and that the expedition itself was commanded by Gonçalo Coelho. Setting out from Lisbon in May 1501, the expedition made a watering stop in early June at Bezeguiche, as the bay of Dakar, near present-day Senegal, was known to the Portuguese sailors of the time. There, they stumbled upon Diogo Dias, who related to the Portuguese captain and Vespucci the tales of his misadventures. Just two days later, the lead ship of the returning India fleet—the Anunciada under Nicolau Coelho—sailed into Bezeguiche, which must have been a pre-arranged point of encounter for the Second Armada, surprised to find both Dias and the Brazilian mapping expedition there. For the next two weeks, the captains and crews of the different ships exchanged tales of their travels and adventures. It has been since speculated that it was during this time that Amerigo Vespucci came up with his "New World" hypothesis. After all, Vespucci was quite familiar with the Americas, having participated in Ojeda's 1499 expedition to the coasts of South America, and it is said he had intense discussions at Bezeguiche with Gaspar da Gama, undoubtedly the person most familiar with the East Indies. Comparing notes, it probably dawned on Vespucci that it was simply impossible to square what he knew of the Americas with what the men of the Second Armada knew of Asia. While still at Bezeguiche, Vespucci wrote a letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, relating his encounter, which he sent back with some Florentine passengers on the Anunciada. This was a prelude to an even more famous letter of Vespucci to Lorenzo in 1503, shortly after his return, in which he asserts that the Brazilian landmass was in fact a