A Florentine’s New World letters put America on the map
Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator who lived from 1454 to 1512, sailed for Spain and then Portugal around the turn of the sixteenth century. Letters under his name popularised a “New World,” and in 1507 Martin Waldseemüller stamped the Latinised “America” onto a map—tying two continents to one man’s first name.
His father, Nastagio, was a notary for Florence’s money-changers’ guild. While his older brothers went to the University of Pisa, Amerigo stayed home to be taught by his uncle Giorgio Antonio, a Dominican. In 1478 another relative, Guido Antonio, took him along on a diplomatic mission to Paris. After his father died in 1482 he went to work for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, a former schoolmate, and was later sent to Seville to assess the family’s business agent there.
By 1492 he had settled in Seville, drawn into the dealings of the merchant Gianotto Berardi, who put half a million maravedis into Columbus’s first voyage. As executor of Berardi’s will, Vespucci ended up 140,000 maravedis in debt while still supplying ships for the Indies. He married María Cerezo, whom his will names as a daughter of the commander Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba.
Almost everything known about his voyages comes from a few letters whose authorship and honesty historians dispute. The best documented trip left Spain on 18 May 1499 under Alonso de Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa, chasing pearls Columbus had reported; after the Canaries it made landfall near Suriname or French Guiana, and Vespucci’s pair of ships turned south. In 1501 Manuel I of Portugal sent him to measure the land Cabral had stumbled on, the future Brazil. A letter to Piero Soderini describes an earlier 1497–98 voyage that no other source mentions; Bartolomé de las Casas suspected it was invented to beat Columbus to the mainland.
Printed booklets of 1503 and 1505 carried his claim that Brazil belonged to an unknown fourth continent, and they sold widely across Europe. That idea moved Waldseemüller to name the landmass after him. Castile made him a subject by decree in 1505, and from 1508 until his death he was chief navigator of the Casa de Contratación.
Source: Amerigo Vespucci
