How did our country get named “America?”

Most sources agree that “America” is a feminized version of Amerigo, after the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454? – 1512). But it’s unlikely Vespucci ever set foot in modern-day North America, nor did he actually captain any voyages to the New World. He went as an observer. So how did America get named after him?

In 1507, a mapmaker named Martin Waldseemüller made a huge map that was meant to update Ptolemy’s map (the one used by Columbus, which grossly underestimated the size and circumference of the Earth). The new map added newfound knowledge of a fourth continent (North/South America), hitherto unknown to Europeans, along with a new (to Europeans) ocean, called the Pacific. The map included data from one of Vespucci’s voyages to the New World (probably the one from 1501-2). Waldseemüller called it (in translation) Universal Geography according to the Tradition of Ptolemy and Contributions of Amerigo Vespucci and Others. He labeled what is modern-day Brazil “America,” after Amerigo, and put Ptolemy in one corner and Vespucci in another.

Six years after the 1507 map was published, Waldseemüller tried to recant his original Vespucci attribution and to rename the continent of South America “Prisilia” and North America terra de Cuba, Asiae partis. According to historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto in his book, Amerigo, Waldseemüller swung the other way and accepted Columbus’s bizarre claim that Cuba was part of Asia.* But Terra de Cuba, Asiae Partis didn’t roll off the tongue as easily, so the name “America” stuck. By 1538 another mapmaker labeled both the Northern and Southern halves “America.”

A lot of controversy surrounds Vespucci’s voyages. For starters, no one is entirely sure if he travelled to the New World two times or four times. Some letters originally thought to be written by Vespucci surfaced which are now believed to be inauthentic.

Vespucci was from Florence, and began his career as a sort of dodgy businessman who worked for the Medici family as, among other things, a wine merchant, jeweler, debt collector, and pimp (or a “procurer” as it was euphemistically called).** He eventually moved to Seville, Spain, at just about the same time that Christopher Columbus was drumming up backers for his trip across the Atlantic. Amerigo helped provision Columbus’s ships, which earned him Ralph Waldo Emerson’s disparaging nickname, “pickle dealer.” Eventually he decided he’d garner more fame and fortune actually embarking on these voyages, rather than just provisioning them.

Many Columbus fans thought Vespucci had taken credit away from Columbus, and that the new continent ought to have been named after the great admiral instead. But the real outrage is that no European ought to be credited for discovering the “New World.”  It had long been inhabited by native people at the time of Columbus’s arrival. And there is compelling evidence that the late fifteenth century voyages of Columbus and Vespucci were not the first time explorers from the Old World had come to the New World. The Vikings probably sailed to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and possibly as far south as Cape Cod in AD 600, and much earlier than that, there is evidence that West Africans and/or Phoenicians sailed to Central America—perhaps as long ago as 1000 BC. The nine-foot Olmec Heads in southeastern Mexico have distinctly African features and have led to much speculation by archaeologists that an ancient civilization from Africa was the first to cross the Atlantic.***

* Fernandez-Armesto, 187

**Fernandez-Armesto, 35

***James W. Loewen, 43-4