“Who is America named after?”
-
Excerpt From: Lloyd, John. “QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition.”
Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant.
Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot – the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorised by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the West.
On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, pre-dating Vespucci by two years.
Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: ‘… on St John the Baptist’s day [24 June], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew’, that clearly suggests this is what happened.”
“Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term ‘America’ to refer to the new continent.
The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502.
This suggests he didn’t know for sure, and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name ‘America’ was known and used was Bristol – not somewhere the French-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced ‘America’ with ‘Terra Incognita’ in his world map of 1513.
Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the term ‘America’ for his discovery.
There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but “always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land or the Cook Islands).
America would have become ‘Vespucci Land’ (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.
