The map that named the New World
One of the great mysteries of the New World is its name. Why were both continents named after a relatively unknown Italian merchant by the name of Amerigo Vespucci, rather than the great explorers who are much more well known for discovering and exploring its shores in the 1490s?
Even as a child I wondered about this mystery. My teachers would describe the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Henry Hudson, Vasco da Gama, Vasco Balboa, etc, but tell us little of Vespucci. Yet North and South America both honor him with his name. Why? How?
I finally got the answer to that question in reading Toby Lester’s 2010 history, The Fourth Part of the World. It not only tells the story of that European discovery of the whole world, beginning in the 12th century (when little was known outside Europe) to the 16th century (when Spanish and Portuguese sailors were circling the entire globe), it also puts that story in the context of map-making, which provided those explorers the information they needed to venture out into unknown seas.
Lester centers his story on one map, created in 1507 by a small somewhat obscure group of cartographers located in the foothills of the Alps near the German-French border, that for the first time put the name “America” on the New World, as shown below.
A small section of the entire global Waldseemuller map. South
America is on the right, its western coast at that time unknown.
Africa is to the left.
This map, dubbed the Waldseemuller map, was lost for centuries. The booklet that went with it was available, as well as some later copies of it by others, but the map itself could not be found anywhere. What historians could glean however was that when it was printed and distributed widely in the early 1500s, it provided everyone a name for these new continents, something that up until then had been lacking. It was therefore not surprising that the name stuck.
And the map’s creators, Matthias Ringmann (who wrote the text) and Martin Waldseemuller (who drew the map), based that choice on a long letter that described the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, who it said had led a series of four voyages beginning in 1497 that mapped almost the entire eastern coast of South America, actually touching the mainland a year ahead of Columbus. As far as they could tell at that time, Vespucci had discovered more of the New World than anyone, done it first, and had shown it to be made up of new continents as large as Africa and entirely separate from the East Indies and China.
It thus made perfect sense to name these discoveries after him.
What they did not know, as Lester clearly describes, was that this letter was a fake. Vespucci as a merchant had led at least one voyage to the New World which had mapped almost the entire eastern coast of South America — more than anyone else up until then — but he had done it later, in 1499, after Columbus first touched down in northern South America. When Vespucci published his work others quickly plagiarized it and exaggerated what he had done, creating confusion that for centuries has made many question Vespucci’s real achievements.
Lester tells this story like a good detective novel, laying out the mystery at the beginning, then providing us step-by-step the background and then the suspects and finally the solution to the puzzle. What makes the story even more of a page-turner is that though historians had known of the Waldseemuller map for more than two centuries, all copies of it had been lost until Father Joseph Fischer, a Jesuit priest who taught history and liked to search for and collect old maps, discovered a copy buried in the German castle in 1901.
It is a grand tale, and in the process Lester tells us the entire history of cartography and how it influenced the European explorers who ventured out into the unknown seas.
In describing this European discovery of the whole Earth, Lester also does something profoundly important: He recovers the reputation of Columbus. It has become cool in popular culture as well as modern academic circles to denigrate Columbus in all manner of ways. “He didn’t know what he discovered!” “He thought it was Asia, even after others proved otherwise!” “He enslaved natives!” “He was a colonizing white supremacist!”
What Lester does is put Columbus’s voyages in the proper context. Based on what was actually known in 1492 and for at least a decade afterward, it was perfectly reasonable for Columbus to believe he had landed in the East Indies near China. In fact, many at the time agreed with him. It took at least two decades for the existence of the New World to finally be proven. Columbus carefully studied the knowledge of his time, better than most, and used that knowledge to sail out into the Atlantic farther than anyone had ever gone before, by at least one to two thousand miles.
And as for the leftist accusations of slavery and white supremacy, that’s just stupid out-of-context anti-western propaganda designed to slander this great explorer, simply because he represents the best part of western civilization: the urge to explore and push the unknown, with courage and daring, and against all odds. Almost everyone at that time bought and sold slaves. It was considered a more morally acceptable way of dealing with war prisoners, rather than simply killing them. And as for the racial condemnation, his attitude toward the natives he met was far more benign that others, in Europe and on the native side. And he didn’t go as a slave-trader. Columbus hoped instead to trade for gold and rare spices known to be available in the East Indies and China. Unfortunately, he wasn’t in the East Indies and China, and there was no gold or rare spices to be had.
If you want to get a really understanding of the history of the first detailed exploration of the Earth, I highly recommend The Fourth Part of the World. It is not only be a fun read, it teaches things that should have been taught routinely in elementary school.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
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"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I love this book.
I seem to remember a page that depicts a globe held in the hand of an emperor that had what looked like the capitalized letter “T” where the center spike was the Mediterranean…the right side of the crossbar was the Nile, and the other side the river Don.
The three parts.
South America was the real prize according to the book.
Yet it appears by your last line that you really didn’t read it. Or if you did, you quickly imposed your own magically thinking onto it to make up what you think it was about.
South America was not the “real prize.” That distorts the history so much I can’t even begin to explain it.
Europe was a pretty miserable place before the Age of Exploration. I do not believe there was a generalized “urge to explore and push the unknown”, but rather a lot of disgruntles fanning out looking for the lost “Garden of Eden”; the lost “Shangri-La”; or later “El-Dorado. The easy life, in other words.
But their discoveries was absolutely, coupled with the Enlightenment, the foundations to what you can call the European’s curiosity about existence, in all its manifestations.
I didn’t say South America was the real prize overall–but that their agrarian mindset was such than many felt North America too cold…thus South America was the focus at-that-time.
But you didn’t say that. You did what you always do, throw out one line out of context with no explanation. The details you added now are clarifying, but I repeat, you didn’t say that then.
There was some gold to be had in Cuba and Hispaniola – just not as much as the Spaniards wanted. It’s what whetted their appetite for the riches of Mesoamerica which, yes, came a generation after 1492.
Mesoamerica hosts quite a few peppers as well, if not Indonesian spices. Barbasco root was prized at the time as a birth-control supplement. (I don’t know if it works, but the Spanish court thought it did.) The xitomatl / tomato was also thought to be an aphrodisiac(!) iirc. Chocolatl was probably the biggest cash crop from out of there.
“Barbasco root was prized at the time as a birth-control supplement. (I don’t know if it works, but the Spanish court thought it did.) The xitomatl / tomato was also thought to be an aphrodisiac(!) iirc. ”
I’m up for the clinical trials.
One historical fact that surprised me was that it was the British that introduced the potato to North America. I assumed trade should have brought this tuber north but apparently not. The Darién Gap must have been a thing even back then.
Indeed. The Scots tried making a colony in Darien. “We’ll be drinkin’ RUM on the beach!!”
Yeah… no, Scotty. Some say that scheme was the end of Scotland itself as an autonomous power.
Yeah, pretty much. After that, my ancestors got smarter and decided to run the British Empire rather than play any more at attempting to establish their own. Good move. There was that unfortunate bit of backsliding anent Bonnie Prince Charlie in the 1740s, to be sure. But, other than more emigration to the British colonies in North America than might have been expected otherwise, that was pretty much a hiccup. The Scots still pine a bit for “independence,” but that never comes to much even when its advocates manage to get it put to a plebiscite.
It’s more than a bit like American Indians still imagining they are “nations” and could again be the warriors their ancestors were. Ah well, the American Indians were actually tribal warriors a lot more recently than the Scots so one has to make allowances I suppose.
1507 — just 54 years after the final fall of the Roman Empire. If a cannon engineer had been less greedy, perhaps there would be Greek-speaking Roman colonies in the New World.
Meanwhile, high school seniors cannot even read:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4V4nLFzGovY&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3D
The teacher can cry all he wants to. Our tax dollars went to athletic programs and stadiums….nerds forced to do the homework of jocks…sadder still when that nerd is a young Sheldon type whose parents only had an interest in Hee Haw.
I was hoping COVID would kill sports.
I had a friend with a 170 IQ who did nothing but wash dishes due to epilepsy and halting speech.
He’s the one deserving of tears.
Mr Z
You continue your relentless trend of forcing me to add books to my “To read” list.
My wife is already worried that the stack on my night stand will topple and bury us in our sleep.
Be glad I don’t include reviews of mediocre books that add to my knowledge but I do not think worth plugging. :)
Hello Dick,
[Puts on pedantic man hat] I feel I must point out that the whole objective of the 1745 Rising, at least from Charles’s perspective, was the gain control of *all of Britain*, not just Scotland! In fact, he got his army as far south as Derby, in his march on London, before being forced to retreat. A significant chunk of his army was composed of English Jacobites, in fact (just not as many as he had been hoping for).
Popular mythology today tends to paint the Jacobites as just a Scottish secessionist movement (or even just a Highlands secession movement). But I think that ship had sailed by the 18th century, save for a small number of bitter enders. By that point, for most, it had become a question not of whether there should be a united kingdom, but who exactly should be running it.