Amerigo Vespucci's Voyages (1499–1502) and the Name America

Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages along the coast of South America between 1499 and 1502 made a Florentine merchant-turned-navigator one of the most famous names in history. Sailing first for Spain and then for Portugal, Vespucci came to believe that the lands across the Atlantic were not part of Asia but a separate continent. His letters, printed across Europe, spread the idea of a “New World”, and in 1507 mapmakers named that world America after him.

Background: a Florentine in Seville

Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence in 1454 (some sources give 1451) into a respectable family with links to the powerful Medici. He trained in commerce and worked for the bank and business interests of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, a cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

In the early 1490s Vespucci was sent to Seville, where Florentine merchants were heavily involved in financing and supplying Atlantic voyages. He worked with the merchant Giannotto Berardi, who helped provision Christopher Columbus’s expeditions. Vespucci therefore knew Columbus personally and followed the news of his first voyage and later voyages closely.

Columbus’s reports from his third voyage of 1498, which reached the coast of Venezuela and the vast outflow of the Orinoco, suggested a large landmass. Spain’s crown, eager to break Columbus’s monopoly, began licensing other captains. This opened the door for Vespucci, now in his mid-forties, to go to sea.

The 1499–1500 voyage for Spain

Vespucci’s first well-attested voyage was with the Spanish expedition of Alonso de Ojeda, which left the Bay of Cádiz in May 1499 with the experienced pilot Juan de la Cosa. Vespucci appears to have commanded or sailed with part of the fleet, possibly two ships, that separated from Ojeda after reaching the South American coast.

According to his own account, Vespucci’s ships followed the coast south-east, reaching what is now northern Brazil and possibly the region of the Amazon mouth, before turning back north-west. How far south he really went is debated, because his descriptions are vague and partly contradict other sources.

The ships then sailed along the coast of present-day Venezuela, past the island of Trinidad and the pearl-rich coast of Paria, before heading to Hispaniola. Vespucci was back in Spain by the summer of 1500. He observed the stars of the southern sky and tried to work out longitude from the positions of the Moon and planets, an ambitious method that showed his interest in navigation as a science.

The 1501–1502 voyage for Portugal

By 1501 Vespucci had moved into Portuguese service, invited by King Manuel I. The previous year Pedro Álvares Cabral had landed in Brazil on his way to India, and the king wanted the new coast explored.

A small fleet of three ships left Lisbon in May 1501. Its commander is not named in the surviving sources; historians often suggest Gonçalo Coelho, but this is uncertain. At Bezeguiche, near modern Dakar in Senegal, the fleet met ships of Cabral’s fleet returning from India. Vespucci talked with men who had been to the Indian Ocean, which helped convince him that the land he was about to explore was not Asia.

The expedition reached the Brazilian coast around August 1501, near Cape São Roque, and then sailed south for months. Place names from this voyage, tied to saints’ days in the calendar, survive on later maps and in modern Brazil: the Bay of All Saints (Bahia) is traditionally linked to 1 November 1501, and Rio de Janeiro to January 1502.

Vespucci later claimed the ships reached about 50 degrees south, far down the coast of Patagonia, before cold and storms forced them back. Many historians think this is exaggerated and that the fleet turned back somewhere around the Río de la Plata or southern Brazil. The expedition returned to Lisbon in July 1502.

The letters and the “New World”

Vespucci’s fame rests less on what he did at sea than on what he wrote. Two printed works carried his name across Europe:

• Mundus Novus (“New World”), a short Latin letter addressed to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, printed around 1502–1504. It described the 1501–1502 voyage and argued that the lands visited should be called a new world, because the ancients had not known them and they were inhabited by more peoples and animals than Europe, Asia or Africa.
• The Soderini Letter, an Italian text printed in Florence around 1505 and addressed to Piero Soderini, the head of the Florentine republic. It described four voyages, the first supposedly in 1497.

Both works were sensational bestsellers by the standards of early printing, with dozens of editions and translations. They included vivid and sometimes lurid descriptions of Indigenous peoples, which shaped European stereotypes for generations.

Historians treat these texts with caution. Three private letters by Vespucci to the Medici, which survive in manuscript copies and were rediscovered in the eighteenth century, are generally regarded as more reliable. Some scholars believe the printed letters were edited, embellished or partly written by others to sell copies. The claimed 1497 voyage, which would have placed Vespucci on the mainland before Columbus, is widely rejected.

How America got its name

In the small town of Saint-Dié in Lorraine, a group of scholars led by the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller and the poet Matthias Ringmann was preparing a new edition of Ptolemy’s geography. They had read the Soderini Letter in a French or Latin version.

In April 1507 they published a short book, the Cosmographiae Introductio, together with a large printed world map. The book proposed that since Europe, Asia and Africa bore women’s names, the new fourth part of the world should be called America, after “Americus” Vespucci who had discovered it. The Waldseemüller map of 1507 printed the word America across what is now South America.

Waldseemüller himself later dropped the name, but it had already spread through copies and other maps. In 1538 the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator applied it to both northern and southern continents, which helped fix the modern usage. Spanish official documents continued for centuries to prefer “the Indies”.

Later life

Vespucci returned to Spain and became a Castilian subject in 1505. In 1508 the crown appointed him the first piloto mayor (chief pilot) of the Casa de Contratación in Seville. In this post he examined and licensed pilots and oversaw the official master chart of discoveries, known as the Padrón Real.

The post suited his interest in astronomy and navigation. Pilots returning from the Indies had to report their observations, and the information was used to correct the master chart, so that later fleets could sail with better maps than the explorers themselves had used.

He died in Seville on 22 February 1512. There is no evidence that he campaigned to have the continent named after him, and he probably never knew of the 1507 proposal.

Key people

• Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512): Florentine merchant, navigator and writer whose letters popularised the idea of a New World.
• Alonso de Ojeda (c. 1466–c. 1515): Spanish captain who led the 1499 expedition on which Vespucci sailed.
• Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (1463–1503): Vespucci’s patron and the addressee of Mundus Novus.
• Manuel I of Portugal (reigned 1495–1521): sponsored the 1501–1502 voyage along Brazil.
• Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470–c. 1520): German cartographer who first printed the name America on a map.

Myths and facts

Myth: Vespucci named America after himself. The name was proposed by Waldseemüller and Ringmann, scholars who never met him. Vespucci’s own writings do not suggest the name.

Myth: Vespucci reached the mainland before Columbus. This depends on the claimed 1497 voyage in the Soderini Letter, which most historians regard as fictitious or confused. Columbus reached the coast of Venezuela in August 1498.

Myth: America was named after a Bristol merchant called Richard Amerike. This theory, linked to John Cabot’s backer, has been popularised but has no documentary support, and is not accepted by historians.

Fact: Vespucci was later accused of fraud. The Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas, writing decades later, accused him of stealing credit from Columbus. Modern historians generally see Vespucci as a capable navigator whose reputation was inflated, and then deflated, by texts he did not fully control.

Timeline

• 1454, 9 March: Amerigo Vespucci is born in Florence (some sources give 1451).
• 1499, May: Vespucci sails from Spain with Alonso de Ojeda’s expedition.
• 1500, summer: He returns to Spain after visiting the coasts of Brazil, Venezuela and Hispaniola.
• 1501, May: He leaves Lisbon on a Portuguese voyage to explore the Brazilian coast.
• 1502, July: The Portuguese expedition returns to Lisbon.
• c. 1502–1504: Mundus Novus is printed and spreads the idea of a “New World”.
• 1507, April: Waldseemüller and Ringmann publish a map and book naming the new continent America.
• 1508: Vespucci becomes chief pilot of the Casa de Contratación in Seville.
• 1512, 22 February: Vespucci dies in Seville.
• 1538: Mercator’s world map applies “America” to both continents.

Why it matters

Vespucci’s voyages were less dramatic than those of Columbus or Magellan, but his writing changed how Europeans understood the globe. By arguing that the lands across the Atlantic were a separate continent, his letters helped Europeans abandon the idea that Columbus had reached Asia. The accident of a printed map in 1507 then turned a Florentine first name into the name of two continents and hundreds of millions of people.