Amerigo Vespucci: the man who gave the “New World” its name

A whole hemisphere is called after a man who was a banker by profession, not a sailor. Amerigo Vespucci of Florence went to the coast of South America in 1501 with three Portuguese ships. On his return he wrote a letter, and one sentence in it became famous: these lands “we may rightly call a new world.” Six years later, in a small town in France, a few scholars drew a large map on the basis of that same letter and wrote the name “America” on the new land.

The merchant of Florence

William Brooks Greenlee writes in the Hakluyt Society’s 1938 volume that Vespucci had a deep interest in geography and cosmography. At the age of 40 he went to Seville in Spain to represent the business of the famous Medici family of Florence.

According to Greenlee, when news of Brazil arrived with Cabral’s fleet in 1500, Portugal decided to send a new fleet to explore the coast further and summoned Vespucci. In early May 1501 he sailed from Lisbon with three ships. Citing the Portuguese historian Duarte Galvão, Greenlee says the commander of the fleet was probably Gonçalo Coelho, and that Vespucci probably went with him as a representative of the king or of Italian merchants.

A chance meeting in Cape Verde

Vespucci’s voyage is described in the letter printed under his name, “Mundus Novus” or “New World”, addressed to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici of Florence. According to George Tyler Northup’s 1916 English translation, the fleet left Lisbon on 14 May 1501. It passed the Canary Islands and followed the African coast to Cape Verde, which the local people called “Beseguiche”.

There an interesting coincidence occurred. According to Greenlee, at the port of Beseguiche Vespucci met two ships of Cabral’s fleet returning from India. Vespucci heard from their crews about the voyage to India. On 4 June 1501 he wrote from there to Florence a letter that lists the names of many Indian cities and ports.

Forty-four days of storm

According to “Mundus Novus”, after leaving Cape Verde no land was seen for two months and three days. Vespucci writes: “Of the sixty-seven days of our voyage, forty-four were continuous rain, thunder and lightning, so dark that we could see neither the sun by day nor a clear sky by night.” The sailors had almost given up hope of life when land came into view. On 7 August 1501 the fleet anchored off that coast.

Vespucci was convinced that this was not an island but a continent, because the coast ran long and straight and the population was countless. The fleet sailed along about 300 leagues of coast until it reached a point where the coast turned south. From there they went about 600 leagues further south. According to Vespucci, they passed the Tropic of Capricorn, until the South Pole appeared fifty degrees above the horizon.

Vespucci writes proudly that the route came from his knowledge, because he could measure the height of the stars with the quadrant and the astrolabe.

The new land and the southern sky

“Mundus Novus” describes the land as follows: hills, wide valleys, great rivers, cold springs and forests so dense that passing through them was almost impossible. Trees grew very large without cultivation. Vespucci writes that there are so many kinds of parrots and other birds that the Roman scholar Pliny did not describe even a thousandth part of them.

What interested him most was the sky. He writes that around the South Pole there is no prominent constellation like the Great Bear and Little Bear of the northern sky, but that several groups of bright stars and a very large “black Canopus” can be seen in the Milky Way. He also writes that a white rainbow was seen twice near midnight, and that it was seen not by him alone but by all the sailors.

Citing Galvão, Greenlee says the fleet returned to Portugal in September 1502.

The 1507 map and “America”

John Hébert, a map specialist at the US Library of Congress, wrote in 2003 that in the town of Saint-Dié in eastern France there was a small circle of scholars that included the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller. In spring 1507 this circle published a large map of the world, gores for a small globe, and a book to be read with the map, “Cosmographiae Introductio”. The full title of the map was: “A map of the whole earth according to the tradition of Ptolemy and the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and others.”

According to Hébert, the map was printed from woodblocks on twelve separate sheets and, when joined, measured more than four feet high and more than eight feet long. It is the first document on which the name “America” appears. It is also the first map to show the western hemisphere as a separate continent and the Pacific as a separate ocean.

The accompanying book gives the reason for the name as follows: the fourth part of the world was discovered by Amerigo Vespucci, and “I do not see why anyone should rightly object to calling it ‘Amerige’, that is, the land of Americus, or ‘America’, after Americus, its discoverer, a man of sagacious mind, since both Europe and Asia have received their names from women.”

Hébert writes that it is notable that a whole hemisphere was named after a living person; Vespucci died in 1512. Waldseemüller himself removed the name from his maps of 1513 and 1516. But the German globe maker Johannes Schöner used it in 1515 and Peter Apian in 1520, and so the name came into general use.

Tradition holds that 1,000 copies of the map were printed, but only one survived. It was preserved in Wolfegg Castle in Germany, along with Schöner’s papers. The Library of Congress bought this only known copy in May 2003. It is kept today in Washington, in the library’s Thomas Jefferson Building.

How many voyages, which letters?

Scholars have long debated the number of Vespucci’s voyages and the authenticity of the letters printed under his name. In “Mundus Novus” he calls this voyage his third. Another printed letter mentions four voyages, which Hébert calls “alleged”. According to Greenlee, the language of these printed letters differs from that of Vespucci’s private letters, and they may have been printed elsewhere for general readers. The date of departure also differs: Galvão gives March 1501, while “Mundus Novus” gives 14 May.

Next instalment: The map of Piri Reis.