If other men with far less imagination now inherited the privileges and the titles of Christopher Columbus, it was a virtual nobody who suddenly became immortalized by having his name attached to the discoveries of the Admiral. In 1502, a Florentine merchant named Amerigo Vespucci wrote a series of letters entitled Mundus Novus, in which he declared that the coast of the mainland of the Indies could rightly “be described as a new world, since our forefathers had no knowledge of it; and so for all who hear thereof it is something quite new.”
Amerigo Vespucci was not an explorer by any stretch of the imagination, though in his letters he described four voyages that he claimed to have made. The first, which supposedly sailed from Cadiz in 1497, described a voyage to parts of America which were not even visited by anyone until twenty years later, and which probably existed only in Vespucci’s imagination. In 1499 he did accompany Alonso de Ojeda on that infamous voyage to the pearl coast of Paria, but that was almost certainly the first time he ever saw the New World. And though he had joined that expedition merely as a gentleman volunteer, in his letters he described it as if he had been its leader, with neither Ojeda nor Juan de la Cosa ever being mentioned at all.
There were two more voyages in the services of Portugal. In the summer of 1499, Vasco da Gama had returned from India by way of the Cape of Good Hope; since da Gama was too worn out to follow up immediately on this discovery, the command of another fleet was offered to Pedro Alvares Cabral, who left from Lisbon in March, 1500. On the way, either accidentally or by design, the fleet got off course, and toward the end of April landed on the coast of Brazil. Cabral named the land Vera Cruz in honor of the Southern Cross visible in the sky, and since that coast lay east of the Papal Demarcation line, Cabral claimed it in the name of the King of Portugal. After only a few days’ stay, however, the fleet returned to its original goal of the Indies by way of the African cape. It was left to another Portuguese explorer, Gonzales Coelho, to follow up on that new land. It was on Coelho’s two subsequent voyages to the South American coast that Amerigo Vespucci participated as a gentleman volunteer, but once again he let it be inferred that he commanded them all and, in fact, never mentioned Coelho at all.
If he was somewhat less than an intrepid explorer, Vespucci certainly possessed a natural gift for writing, and his Mundus Novus collection became so widely circulated that every important cartographer and historian of the time seems to have read these letters. Among them was a German scientist, Martin Waldseemueller, who was at that time head of the Academy of Saint-Die, famous for its geographical studies. Waldseemueller confirmed Vespucci’s statements that this was indeed a New World, and on a famous map of 1507 he gave that new landmass the name of ‘Amerigo’s Land’ – or, in the Latin of the day, Terra America. Waldseemueller could hardly have expected that the great men of his profession would adopt that name for an entire continent, but America proved so clean and easy, so natural an addition to the names of Europe, Asia and Africa, that nearly every writer and cartographer in Northern Europe began to use it. The Spanish held out for several centuries, continuing to call their new world Las Indias, and Waldseemueller himself usually referred to the continent as Mundus Novus, the New World. But the deed was done; America gradually worked itself onto the maps and into the minds of people, and by the mid-1500′s the name referred to North America as well. And America it was to remain.