1608. The Colony that Never Was. The Medici Venture in America

In September 1608, two ships, a caravel and a tartane, set sail from Livorno, bound for the Amazon coast. Leading the expedition was an English privateer, accompanied by cartographers skilled in Spanish and Portuguese navigation techniques and a crew of Tuscan sailors. They were fulfilling the vision of a Grand Duke who had transformed a fishing village into the most cosmopolitan port in the Mediterranean.
Ferdinando I de’ Medici, son of Cosimo I, was not a ruler content with the borders of Tuscany. He believed that the gold his predecessor and brother Francesco had sought in alchemy might be found elsewhere: in an immense, contested territory that was largely still untouched. Thus, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany embarked upon what was the only colonial venture ever undertaken by an Italian state in the Americas. A colony on the coast of Maranhão would have given Livorno, and the wider Mediterranean economy, a new foothold on the Atlantic side of the world.
Reconstructed from archival documents, diplomatic letters and the harrowing account of a captured surgeon, this is the forgotten story of the Thornton expedition: the gamble of a small state seeking to measure itself against the vastness of the Atlantic.