Amerigo Vespucci - Italian Explorer & Discovered South America

While Christopher Columbus discovered America, he didn't lend it his name. That honor falls to the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci. Amerigo Vespucci was one of the first to realize that North and South America were nowhere near Asia, were separate continents. Columbus, on the other hand, never ceased to believe that his discoveries were part of Asia. Born in Florence, Italy in 1451, Amerigo Vespucci held a series of jobs, merchant, steward, banker, and ultimately operated a ship outfitting business in Sevilla, Spain, before becoming an explorer in his 40s. He apparently met Columbus and through conversation with him sparked his interest in going to the Indies, which is what the Spaniards called the Americas. In 1497, Vespucci sailed with a fleet of Spanish ships in search of a western passage to the Indies and landed in Central America. He is believed to have sailed as far north as the Gulf of St. Lawrence before returning to Spain. On May 16, 1499, Vespucci sailed from Cadiz to the New World and explored along the coast of Brazil and in the course of that voyage discovered the Amazon River. Vespucci's third voyage embarked in 1501, this time in the service of Portuguese King Manuel I. Passing through the Cape Verde Islands, Vespucci explored the coasts of Brazil and Argentina, where he discovered present-day Rio de Janeiro and studied the Native Americans. When Amerigo Vespucci returned from his third voyage, he asserted that the lands that he had explored were not, as Columbus had insisted, part of Asia, but were instead part of the New World. Vespucci called it a new fourth part of the world alongside Africa, Asia and Europe. Records are mixed as to whether Vespucci sailed on one or three additional expeditions to the New World. What is known is that he returned to live in Spain and in 1508 was awarded the prestigious office of pilot major. On February 22, 1512, Amerigo Vespucci died of malaria in Sevilla, Spain. The New World received the name America, a feminized version of Amerigo Vespucci, because Vespucci was a good propagandist. Amerigo's writings about the New World were much more known than anything Columbus had written. A German cartographer, Martin Waldseemuller, produced a world map in 1517. On this world map, he claimed that Amerigo Vespucci had actually been the first person to make landfall on what we now know as America or South America. It's been named America ever since.