When it is about talking on the discovery of America, much information has been written about Christopher Columbus and very little about Amerigo Vespucci.

He will long be remembered as the man America was named after but who was this inconsequential explorer and how did he get his name on two continents?

Vespucci was born in 1454 to a prominent family in Florence, Italy. As a young man he read widely, collected books and maps, and even studied under Michaelangelo. He began working for local bankers and was sent to Spain in 1492 to look after his employer's business interests.

While in Spain, be began working on ships and ultimately went on his first expedition as a navigator in 1499. This expedition reached the mouth of the Amazon River and explored the coast of South America. Vespucci was able to calculate how far west he had traveled by observing the conjunction of Mars and the Moon.

The successful first voyages of Christopher Columbus increased Vespucci's desire to take a part in the general European movement to seek a western passage to the Indies. At that time, Colombus has not, as official History remembers "discovered" America as he has during all his life believed he reached Asia.

Having obtained three ships from Ferdinand, King of Castille, Vespucci was able to undertake his first voyage. Accordingly, he set sail from Cadiz on 10 May, 1497, sailing toward the Fortunate Islands, and then laying his course towards the west. After twenty-seven or thirty-seven days, on 6 or 10 April, he touched the mainland (Guiana or Brazil?), and was well received by the inhabitants. In this first voyage he may have entered the Gulf of Mexico and coasted along a great portion of the United States, as far as the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Then he returned to Spain, and landed at Cadiz on 15 October, 1498. There is no other relation of this first voyage than that contained in the first letter of Amerigo Vespucci concerning the islands newly found in his four voyages, addressed to Piero Soderini, mayor of Florence.

On his second voyage in 1501, Vespucci sailed under the Portuguese flag. After leaving Lisbon, it took Vespucci 64 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean due to light winds. His ships followed the South American coast to within 400 miles of the southern tip, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina, today).

While on this voyage, Vespucci wrote two letters to a friend in Europe. He described his travels and was the first to identify the New World of North and South America as separate from Asia. (Until he died, Columbus thought he has reached Asia.) Vespucci also described the culture of the indigenous people, and focused on their diet, religion, and what made these letters very popular - their sexual, marriage, and childbirth practices. The letters were published in many languages and were distributed across Europe (they were a much better seller than Columbus' own diaries).

Columbus and Vespucci were different types of people. Amerigo Vespucci was considered a modern man from the Renaissance period of scientific inquiry that allowed men to independently question events of the times. They had the thirst for knowledge and had to be shown the reasons in scientific methods for all facts. Columbus on the other hand was a man from the old world and not having the advantages of the Renaissance period believed without question the reasons given for events in his time. Columbus believed in tradition and faith of his world while Vespucci had the modern mentality of the Renaissance period.

Vespucci was named Pilot Major of Spain in 1508. Vespucci was proud of this accomplishments, "I was more skillful than all the shipmates of the whole world." Vespucci's third voyage to the New World was his last for he contracted malaria and died in Spain in 1512 at the age of 58.

Martin Waldseemüller

The German clergyman-scholar Martin Waldseemüller liked to make up names. He even created his own last name by combining words for "wood," "lake," and "mill." Waldseemüller was working on a contemporary world map, based on the Greek geography of Ptolmey, and he had read of Vespucci's travels and knew that the New World was indeed two continents. In honor of Vespucci's discovery of the new forth portion of the world, Waldseemüller printed a wood block map (called "Carta Mariana") with the name "America" spread across the southern continent of the New World. Waldseemüller printed and sold a thousand copies of the map across Europe.

Within a few years, Waldseemüller changed his mind about the name for the New World but it was too late. The name America had been kept... The power of the printed word was too powerful to take back. Gerardus Mercator's world map of 1538 was the first to include North America and South America. Thus, continents named for a Italian navigator would live on forever.