NewMexiKen remembers learning that Amerigo Vespucci was just a mapmaker who got America named after him by mistake. Not entirely true.
Vespucci, a native of Florence, settled in Seville in 1492, after a career as a private secretary for various diplomats. He was nearing 40. In 1499, he sailed with one of the first non-Columbian expeditions and explored the north coast of South America, Trinidad, Curaçao and Aruba. Initially, Vespucci agreed with Columbus that these lands were extensions of Asia. By the time he returned to Europe in 1500 though, he thought they were a new continent. Vespucci wrote most enthusiastically about the women he had encountered, which no doubt helped make his reports widely read.
In 1501-1502, Vespucci sailed along the Brazilian coast as far south as the Rio Plata on a commission from the King of Portugal. This was too far south to be Asia. Vespucci wrote, “We arrived at a new land which, for many reasons…we observed to be a continent.” In 1502, the Portugese published a new map showing the new continent with another ocean between it and Asia. In contrast, Columbus continued to believe, until his death in 1506, that he had discovered an extension of Asia.
By this time, because Vespucci had become so well known, two additional letters of his appeared. These have since proven to be forgeries, probably written for fun and profit. They were accepted at the time however, and, ironically, it was one of these that was widely circulated and relied upon by geographer Martin Waldseemüller in his new edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia. In his introduction Waldseemüller wrote: “And since Europe and Asia have received the names of women, I see no reason why we should not call this other place Amerige, that is the land of Amerigo, or America, after the wise man who discovered it.” It was in this publication in 1507 where the new hemisphere was named “America” for the first time. Needless to say, the name stuck.
Meanwhile Vespucci was appointed piloto mayor by Spain, the chief geographer and cartographer for all expeditions to the new world. He died in 1512.
Source: Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold, a book that, while interesting, is burdened with so many trivial details about each and every participant, and so many reversals of chronology, that the story is made tedious.