Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Waldseemüller'ssimplerenderingisextraordinarilyaccurate—withinseventymilesatsev-
eral key points, John Hébert tells me.
Scholars will no doubt be studying the map's remarkable verisimilitude for years to
come, but its chief historical claim to fame—and the reason that Congress would pony up
the cool five mill to rescue it from its German tower prison—is that single “America” at
the lower left. This isn't just the earliest surviving use of the term; the text that accompan-
ied the map makes it clear that, when we peer at the map, we are witnessing the word's
coining in action. “A fourth part of the world has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci,”
not see why anyone should rightly prevent this from being called Amerigen—the land of
Amerigo,asitwere—orAmerica, afteritsdiscoverer,Americus, amanofperceptive char-
acter.”
Columbus's biographer Bartolomé de Las Casas huffily insisted that the new continent
“should have been called Columba instead,” after its
real
discoverer. But Vespucci was
a different kind of proto-American: a showman and a shameless self-promoter. He was a
Florentine merchant who probably deserved only a solid place on the exploration B-list
for tagging along on a couple of Portuguese voyages to Brazil. But his (no doubt exagger-
ated) accounts of those travels took Europe by storm, testament to one eternal advertising
dictum: that sex—even if you write about it in Latin—always sells.
