Amerigo Vespucci: The Explorer Who Named America | Biography & History Book | Perfect for History Enthusiasts & Students

We just passed the 500th anniversary of a remarkable event: America was named America in April 1507. If the excitement of discovery around that time would have allowed Europeans to be fair and rational, we would be the United States of Columbia, perhaps, part of North Columbia with South Columbia below us on the maps. We have a Columbus Day as an annual holiday, but the tribute we give to Columbus's fellow sailor and explorer is the name America, while most people have little knowledge of who Amerigo Vespucci was. In _Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America_ (Random House) by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, readers will understand how the name came to be, unfairly or not. In some ways, the name fits our nation pretty well; Amerigo was a trader and he had a talent for bustle and self-promotion, and for remaking himself when previous ventures failed. In other ways, we might not be so proud. Fernández-Armesto starts his entertaining book: "Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to America, was a pimp in his youth and a magus in maturity." Vespucci's life story is often a murky one, with voids that Fernández-Armesto points out, and it is made more difficult because Vespucci is part of the legends surrounding the European discovery of the New World, and there are still even those who insist that he, rather than Columbus, was the real discoverer.Born in 1454, Vespucci grew up in Florence. As a young man, He took on clients and bought and sold gems, wine, debts, or sexual favors for them. He traveled to Seville to work for a firm that had the contract on supplies for Columbus's voyages. Vespucci, for whom the expeditions of others had not brought riches, joined an expedition himself in 1499, and he wrote about the voyage afterward as if he had been in command of the fleet which made it. He adopted a new persona as navigator, and he learned enough about handling the astrolabes and primitive, clumsy quadrants that he impressed those who watched him. It was almost all bogus, but he talked and acted with authority, and became an authority, the most trusted star-gazer in Europe. He published a bestseller about his travels, a book that inspired another in 1505, the _Soderini Letter_. This one, however, was a genuine fake, borrowing from other accounts. It purported to be by Vespucci and claimed that he was the true discoverer of the New World. It was the fake that was to make America's name. Ptolemy's _Geographia_ was still celebrated as a navigational standard, and in the town of St. Dié, between France and Germany, a new edition was being prepared. It was set to include updates from the new explorations when the geographers doing the updating received the _Soderini Letter_ and incorporated its "data" into the new work. Included was a huge world map, and since the Letter had claimed the true discovery of the New World should be credited to Vespucci, the area that we now know as Brazil was emblazoned with a version of Vespucci's first name.Thus America was named to honor the author of the _Soderini Letter_, only Amerigo didn't write it, for his discovery of the New World, only Amerigo didn't discover it. The geographers in charge of the Ptolemy update and the huge map soon realized that they had been mistaken, but by then their work, too, had become a bestseller. The name stuck, and was reinforced when Mercator subsequently used it on both the northern as well as the southern part of the New World. Amerigo Vespucci, who didn't live to see how the name prospered, would not have minded at all. "By leaving his mark on the map," Fernández-Armesto writes, "Amerigo, the old magus, is still working his magic."