Who was America named after? Detailed answer

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Who was America named after? Detailed answer

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Who was America named after?

Not at all in honor of the Italian merchant, navigator and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. America is named after Richard America, a Welsh merchant from Bristol.

Americus financed the second transatlantic expedition of John Cabot - the English name for the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto - whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 provided the groundwork for subsequent English claims to Canada. In 1484, Cabot moved from Genoa to London and received permission from Henry VII himself to search for unexplored lands of the West.

In May 1497, on his small ship "Matthew" Cabot reached the shores of Labrador, becoming the first officially registered European to set foot on American soil - two years earlier than Vespucci.

Cabot mapped the coast of North America from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland.

Being the main sponsor of the expedition, Richard America, of course, expected that the newly discovered lands would be named after him. In the Bristol calendar we read the entry for that year:

"... on the day of St. John the Baptist [June], the land of America was found by merchants from Bristol, who arrived on a ship from Bristol with the name "Matthew".

It seems to us that the record makes it clear how everything really happened.

And although the author's manuscript of the calendar has not been preserved, there are a number of other documents of that time, where it is mentioned more than once. This is the first time in history that the word "America" has been used as the name of a new continent.

The earliest extant map using the same name is Martin Waldsmuller's 1507 large world map. However, it only applies to South America. In his notes, Waldsmuller suggests that "America" most likely comes from the Latin version of the name Amerigo Vespucci. It was Vespucci who discovered South America and mapped its coastline in 1500-1502.

It turns out that Waldsmuller did not know for sure and was simply trying to somehow explain the word that he met on other maps - including on the Cabot map. The only place where the term "America" was known and actively used was Bristol, a city that Waldsmuller, who lived in France, hardly ever visited. Moreover, in his world map of 1513, he already replaces the word "America" with "Terra Incognita" (Unknown Country (lat.)).

Amerigo Vespucci has never been to North America. All early maps of this country and trade with it were English. Moreover, Vespucci himself never used the name "America" for his discovery.

By the way, there are good reasons for this. New countries and continents have never been named after someone by the name of a person - only by his last name (Tasmania, Van Diemen's Land or the Cook Islands).

If an Italian explorer had consciously decided to name America after himself, it would have become the "Land of Vespucci" (or "Vespuccia").

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

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