Has there ever been a more unlikely story of how a major piece of real estate got its name, and undeservedly so, than that of America and Amerigo Vespucci? Absolutely not.
America is so named because in 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer who made a cut-out map for do-it-yourself globemakers, fell for a forgery called the Soderini Letter that implied Vespucci had discovered a new world. That world was described as being populated by giants, cannibals and nymphomaniacs, the latter inevitably included in most accounts during this phase of the Age of Discovery because travel writing was the most popular genre and such titillating if inaccurate details sold books.
Despite prodigious efforts to correct this whopper, the name America stuck — especially after the legendary mapmaker Gerardus Mercator used it for his Atlas Novus — and the Western Hemisphere would forever not be known as Christopheria, Columbia, That New Place, Over Yonder or any number of more appropriate monikers.
What is beyond dispute is that Vespucci was the first person to confirm that his rival Christopher Columbus had discovered a fourth land mass (Europe, Asia and Africa being the others) as a result of two voyages he made to the east coast of South America in 1499 and 1502. Everything else — and I mean literally everything else — associated with or attributed to Vespucci simply cannot be confirmed as the gospel truth.
Vespucci almost certainly was not behind the Soderini Letter but did not dispute it, and he was an extraordinary piece of work in his own right as is made vividly clear in Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America, a brief and delightful biography by noted historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
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