Vespucci's First Voyage
Amerigo Vespucci sailed with a Spanish expedition under Alonso de Ojeda in 1499, following the route Columbus had opened the previous year to the mouth of the Orinoco. Vespucci was a Florentine merchant, agent of the Medici bank in Seville, who had helped outfit Columbus's ships and had turned to navigation late, in his forties. His formal role on the voyage is unclear; he described himself afterwards as its guiding intelligence, which the Spanish records do not support. The fleet made landfall on the South American coast and then separated. Vespucci turned south-east, following the shore past the mouth of the Amazon and reaching, by his account, some six degrees south of the equator before contrary currents stopped him. Ojeda went north-west along the coast of what became Venezuela — named, according to a later story, for stilt villages that reminded the Spaniards of Venice. Vespucci's importance is not the sailing but the argument he drew from it. He had run along a coastline for hundreds of leagues without finding its end and had seen constellations unknown in the northern hemisphere, and he concluded that this was not Asia at all but a landmass unknown to Ptolemy and the ancients. His published letters, especially the Mundus Novus of 1503, said so plainly and were reprinted across Europe. Martin Waldseemüller put the name America on a map in 1507 for that reason. Vespucci was not consulted and did not use it himself. He was appointed piloto mayor of Spain in 1508, responsible for training navigators and maintaining the master chart. Waldseemüller removed the name from a later map, and by then it had stuck.
- Year: 1499 CE
