March 9 - Happy Birthday, Amerigo Vespucci

Posted on March 9, 2022

Key Points

This is an update of my post published on March 9, 2011:

Were the Americas named after a thief?

Well, that’s what Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. See if you agree…

Born on this day in 1454, Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian navigator and mapmaker who made friends with Christopher Columbus near the end of the latter’s life. Vespucci traveled westward on voyages of exploration with Spanish and Portuguese expeditions between 1499 and 1502. (Remember, Columbus was also an Italian navigator who sailed for Spain.)

A Portuguese man named Pedro Alvares Cabral was said to have discovered what we now call Brazil, and the king of Portugal wanted to know if it was an island or if it was connected to the lands that had been earlier discovered by Columbus and Spanish explorers. The king asked Vespucci to go along on the mission as an observer.

Vespucci apparently didn’t command any of the voyages he was on (scholars disagree on the number), but he did help explore what we now call South America and confirmed that it was continental in size. Vespucci wrote some letters—scholars disagree on the number of letters, since some may be forgeries—and it was these writings that brought the west-lying lands to the attention of many Europeans as a New World, not as the “Indies” or part of Asia.

Above, colors added to make the map more clear.

Note that nobody knew much about what “America”
looked like, at that point, but mapmakers did have a
portion of the east coast of South and Central
America roughly correct.

In 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, a German map maker, produced the world map seen above in full, and in a close-up below. It was on this map that the “New World” was first named America; Waldseemüller chose the name to honor Amerigo Vespucci because, he wrote, Amerigo was “its discoverer, a man of great ability.”

But since the New World was definitely not discovered by Amerigo Vespucci – it wasn’t even discovered by Cabral or Columbus or Leif Ericson – it was ACTUALLY discovered by the people who first migrated to the lands, the people whose descendants became the “Native Americans” or “First Nations”…

Well, the name America is controversial now and was controversial then, too. Some people got very angry that Amerigo Vespucci was trying to upset the glory of Columbus—even though it was Waldseemüller who had done the naming. (Columbus himself never thought ill of Vespucci, apparently; he wrote to his son that Vespucci was a man of good will who had always tried to please him. But Waldseemüller’s map with the name America was published the year after Columbus died.)

Some people claimed that Vespucci was a better self-promoter than navigator, cartographer (map maker), or explorer—and that his letters exaggerated the number of voyages he made, exaggerated his role on the voyages, and even flat-out lied about what he had seen. (But, as I said, scholars have found evidence that some of these letters were forgeries, not written by Vespucci.)

In the mid-1500s Bartholomew de Las Casas was quoted as saying, ”The new continent should have been called Columba and not, as it is unjustly called, America.” Centuries later, in the 1800s, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Strange that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle dealer at Seville, who…managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name.”

By the way, there seems to be zero evidence that Vespucci was ever a pickle dealer. I gather that Emerson was trying to be funny while also casting Vespucci as not even a little bit heroic.

Many sources from Vespucci’s lifetime and from modern scholars restores Vespucci’s reputation and good name, at least for some people—there are those who dispute each claim. No matter what, it seems clear that the naming of the continents after Vespucci was largely a historical accident. A German map maker wished to honor an Italian man who worked for Portugal and Spain—and somehow the name caught on.

See also February 23 – Iwo Jima Day

By calling what we now consider the Americas
a “New World,” Vespucci set folks up for realizing
that these lands had nothing to do with “the Indies”
or other known lands of “the Far East.”

It is interesting to me that some folks are taught that there are seven continents, and others are taught that there are six; the folks I know who live in a 6-continent world are those who count North and South America as one continent, which is called simply “America.” (Some folks in the world consider North and South America to be two separate continents, but they count Europe and Asia as one continent – Eurasia – and some folks count only 5 or even only 4 continents in the world!)

The thing is, everyone living in the “New World” can call themselves “Americans” or “americanos.” Canadians, United States-ians, Mexicans, Panamanians, Cubans, Colombians, Peruvians, Argentinians – all the folks who live in North or South America, or the islands considered to be a part of the Americas, are in some sense Americans.

These kids are Uruguayans and americanos.

These folks are Brazilians and americanos.

This girl is quechua, Peruvian, and americana.

These folks are Paraguayan and americanos.

However, there is a difference in how American/americano is treated in various languages. In English, “America” is short for the United States of America, and “American” is the demonym for those living in the USA. In Spanish, the U.S. is “los estados unidos,” the demonym varies from “estadounidense” to “americano,” and “America” refers to the one continent that English speakers consider two and sometimes call “the Americas.”