America's earliest notation [1507]

Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map...the earliest to slap Amerigo Vespucci’s name on the lands bordering the western Atlantic Ocean.

"March 9, 1454: This Man Is a Continent … or Two"

by

Randy Alfred

March 8th, 2010

Wired

1454: Amerigo Vespucci is born in Florence, Italy. He’ll give his name to two continents.

Vespucci, the son of a notary, went to work for the Medici banking house. They dispatched him as an agent to Seville, Spain, where he arranged the fitting out of ships and the trading of their cargoes.

He seems to have been in Seville when another Italian in Spain, Christopher Columbus, returned to the nearby port of Cadiz from his first journey to the West Indies. Vespucci later helped Columbus prepare his vessels for the Genoese mariner’s second and third voyages of discovery.

Not content to sit on the sidelines when fame and fortune were in the offing, Vespucci arranged for and outfitted his own expeditions to seek a short trade route to India. Vespucci set sail in 1499 and explored the northern coast of what we now call South America. Because he was looking for India, he called the local waters there the “Gulf of the Ganges.”

On his second voyage, Vespucci made a major breakthrough. He followed the eastern coast of the new land south, and south and farther south. He was in fact off the coast of Patagonia, within 400 miles of Tierra del Fuego.

The coast was like nothing previously known to Europeans. Vespucci was convinced it wasn’t Asia at all, but a new world entirely.

Vespucci made one or perhaps two additional voyages to what some were soon calling the New World. A popular account of Vespucci’s journeys appeared in a pamphlet, “The Four Voyages of Amerigo.” It received widespread circulation, thanks to the growth of a relatively new technology, the printing press.

Martin Waldseemüller, a modernist-humanist German clergyman and cartographer, reprinted “The Four Voyages of Amerigo” in 1507 with his own “Cosmographic Introduction.” He opined:

I see no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part … America, after Amerigo [Vespucci], its discoverer, a man of great ability.

Waldseemüller included a map of the the new lands, on which the name “America” makes its earliest appearance.

The map was popular. The name caught on, and it stuck.

And it spread. America was first used as a name for only the southern continent of the New World, but Gerardus Mercator’s 1538 world map included both North America and South America.

Vespucci died in Seville in 1512. Though he reached America after Columbus (and others), it is not unjust that two continents are named in his honor. He does seem to have originated the idea that the new lands were not merely offshore islands of Asia. He reorganized the data, he shifted the paradigm, he deserves the eponym.

So, half a millennium later, the meme lives on. We do not often refer to the New World as Columbia — except in patriotic song and the name of the U.S. national capital. Nor do we call it Ericsonia or Cabotland. Nor is our nation’s name (and we should be grateful for this) Waldseemüller or the United States of Vespucci.