Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), known as Americus Vespucius in Latin, is the Italian explorer that America is named after. He called it the New World. While Columbus thought he was in the Indies, a part of Asia, Vespucci discovered that South America was not part of Asia at all but a new continent.
He went on at least two voyages (1499-1500 and 1501-1502), maybe as many as four. He sailed for both Spain and Portugal. He explored the coast of South America from Venezuela to Patagonia in Argentina (I am using the present-day names). He was the first Western explorer to see the Amazon and Rio de la Plata. He went as far as 50 degrees south of the equator.
He was looking for a passage to India, thinking that South America was the east coast of Asia. According to Ptolemy and Marco Polo the Asian coast turned west at the Cape of Catigara, at 8.5 degrees south of the equator. From there Vespucci hoped to sail on to Taprobane (Sri Lanka). But the coast went on and on and on, hardly ever turning. This was not Asia but some new continent.
He saw new stars that no one could see from Europe. He stayed up late at night trying to find the southern pole star.
He saw new kinds of monkeys, wolves and wild cats – and lost faith in the story of Noah’s Ark.
He saw new kinds of human societies, ones that seemed to have no religion, government, private property or hang-ups about sex, but which also practised cannibalism.
He saw people living in the Torrid Zone (the tropics), more people than in Europe in fact, disproving the ancient Greek idea that it was too hot for people to live there.
The published accounts of his voyages were overblown. We know that by comparing them to his private letters. It seems that printers sensationalized his accounts to sell more books. It worked: Vespucci’s books outsold Columbus three to one. So much so that Vespucci was widely regarded as the one who discovered the New World. So, when German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller updated Ptolemy’s map of the world in 1507, he named Vespucci’s new continent after him: America.
The sensationalized accounts, unfortunately, also helped to fix in the Western mind the stereotype of native Americans as savages, both noble and merciless. It has been confirmation bias ever since.
In 1508 Spain made Vespucci the country’s top navigator. He taught and licensed pilots and kept an up-to-date map of all their discoveries for the Spanish Crown. By then he was a Spanish citizen.
Vespucci came from a rich family in Florence, Italy. Leonardo da Vinci knew him. The powerful Medici family sent him to Seville in the south of Spain to look after their business interests. Vespucci probably saw Columbus return from his first voyage. He knew Columbus: he helped to supply his second and third voyages.
Simonetta Vespucci, the woman that Botticelli painted as Venus on a clamshell, was his cousin-in-law.
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Good post.
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*lurks in the shadows, while watching Marry Burrel. @ : o l ) >
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@ Sondis: I am lurking on Black America Web. LOL! I see you.
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I have a bit of Amerigo Vespucci trivia. When my house was being finished there was a young fellow who did some drywall work and painting by the name of Vespucci, a quiet, intelligent-seeming guy. I asked him if he was related to Amerigo and he said he was. Family must not be too rich anymore. He does excellent drywall work.
More useful are several books I’d recommend to anyone wanting to understand the scope of civilization in the Americas at the time of contact. The book, “1491” is excellent, and I love “Indian Givers” by Jack Weatherford to death. Years ago I had a forum and he did a group chat with us one Saturday night.
Just to give y’all a taste, a little known fact is that the largest empire in the world in 1491 was in South America. The contributions from the civilizations of the Americas, which hide in plain site, are so immense they still impact every bit of modern World Culture, even though their growth was stunted and stolen 300 years ago. We still haven’t outdone them in agriculture, for example. Still haven’t figured out how the hell they managed to create corn from the plant it came from. And the addition of corn to European foodstuffs kicked off the Industrial Revolution.
And one of my favorite figures in world history is Kandioronk, a Huron diplomat who lived in London and Paris the generation before the Age of Enlightenment. A teenager by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau went to see a play about Kandioronk in Paris and became mesmerized with the ideas of democracy. You may have heard the quote “You English live like dogs to your king, but I am the first and last of my nation.” Baron La Hontan transcribed some of his conversations with Kandioronk. The Baron sounds like some quaint, weird guy from a long time ago, Kandioronk sounds like . . . US. Or I should say, we sound like him.
In other words, modern “democratic” philosophy did not come from the Greeks or the Romans, nor was it cooked up by our Founding Fathers. It was stolen from the Enlightened Civilizations that were being eaten for lunch by Old World cannibals. It’s been in the American air a lot longer than 300 years.
Another bit of trivia. The most popular word in the world is the word “okay” which comes from the Iroquois “uktek duktek” Okey dokey, smokey.
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American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) held irrational dislike for Vespucci, Emerson wrote about the Italian as “a pickle vendor” and “boatswain’s mate in an expedition that never sailed. Source: World History Made Simple.
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That’s funny, the USA’s name comes from an ancient typographical error.
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[…] Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), known as Americus Vespucius in Latin, is the Italian explorer that America is named after. He called it the New World. While Columbus thought he was in the Indies, a part of Asia, Vespucci discovered that South America was not part of Asia at all but a new continent.He went on at least two voyages (1499-1500 and 1501-1502), maybe as many as four. He sailed for both Spain and Portugal. He explored the coast of South America from Venezuela to Patagonia in Argentina (I am using the present-day names). He was the first Western explorer to see the Amazon and Rio de la Plata. He went as far as 50 degrees south of the equator.He was looking for a passage to India, thinking that South America was the east coast of Asia. According to Ptolemy and Marco Polo the Asian coast turned west at the Cape of Catigara, at 8.5 degrees south of the equator. From there Vespucci hoped to sail on to Taprobane (Sri Lanka). But the coast went on and on and on, hardly ever turning. This was not Asia but some new continent." […]
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“That’s funny, the USA’s name comes from an ancient typographical error.”
The names for the continents come from an old typographical error. But the name for the country comes from the continents. Once the continental names become established it hardly makes sense to name the country something else.
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[…] Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), known as Americus Vespucius in Latin, is the Italian explorer that America is named after. He called it the New World. While Columbus thought he was in the Indies, a part of Asia, Vespucci discovered that South America was not part of Asia at all but a new continent.He went on at least two voyages (1499-1500 and 1501-1502), maybe as many as four. He sailed for both Spain and Portugal. He explored the coast of South America from Venezuela to Patagonia in Argentina (I am using the present-day names). He was the first Western explorer to see the Amazon and Rio de la Plata. He went as far as 50 degrees south of the equator.He was looking for a passage to India, thinking that South America was the east coast of Asia. According to Ptolemy and Marco Polo the Asian coast turned west at the Cape of Catigara, at 8.5 degrees south of the equator. From there Vespucci hoped to sail on to Taprobane (Sri Lanka). But the coast went on and on and on, hardly ever turning. This was not Asia but some new continent." […]
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@Lind Keres Carter – I hope you realize the Greeks also had democracy, and they had it before the birth of Christ.
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I know all about the Greeks, and that’s my point, they were doing all that 1500 years earlier, but Western history is going to be all over them, crediting them, and completely ignoring the folks alive and kicking in their own time (Enlightenment) who they were rubbing shoulders with in real time.
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Many of the names we have are due to these explorers: America, Columbia, Rhodesia etc. and also the idea that there are “Indians” and “Indies” here. When I think about history I sometimes wonder about what we don’t know. The term “pre-history” is revealing. When did history begin? Maybe history is lacking a diversity of perspectives because the oral records of some people died when their cultures died. It would have been really interesting to hear directly what the Maya or Taino, for example, said about themselves.
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@Linda Keres Carter – the Greeks had it first. If I created the telephone with no prior knowledge of it, I still wouldn’t be the inventor. The Greeks had it first.
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“The Greeks had it first.”
That’s assuming a set of culturally based assumptions and data. Studying many early cultures reveal egalitarian modes of governing themselves. The Greeks instituted some elements that survived. There are some elements that were invented purely by Native Americans. The concept of impeachment came directly from the Iroquois, Iroquois grandmothers actually. It was they who voted in the Speaker of the tribe (they did not have a word for ‘chief,’ nor did they want one.) If he wasn’t up to snuff they voted him out. It’s documented that Franklin, Jefferson, Payne and others studied these principles when framing the constitution. The motif of the thirteen arrows on our dollar bill came from Iroquoian lore.
But my main argument is that the colonials got to be as uppity as they did because they breathed the American air that was already full of sentiments that obedience to a King made you a dog and a man should be more. Think about it, if there were principles of democracy instituted by the Greeks centuries earlier, why is it they suddenly got interesting once the “New World” was accessed? These philosophies were quite common among non-hierarchical cultures. The devastating diseases which Contact brought took as many as 90% of a population, hitting the larger hierarchical cultures very hard. This brought the less populous, non-hierarchical cultures into the forefront, and that’s what Westerners found when they got here.
War could only be waged if the grandma’s voted it in. Motions were only passed if there was consensus, not majority. The Iroquois, who were nobodies at the outset of the Mourning Wars, prevailed basically because they loved their enemies to death. They were so good at adopting captives of war, many would stay if given the choice to return to where they came from,
Regarding Origin’s comment about place names coming from explorers: one of the Native elements hiding in plain site are all the place names that are Indian words. I’m gonna guess about 50 to 75% of place names in this country have not changed from their original names pre contact. I live downstream of the Dan River. The word Dan comes from the Siouan word for river. So, it’s the River River.
Trivia: the word ‘buck’ meaning a dollar, comes from the colonial fur trade. A shirt cost one buck or two does (skins).
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@Linda Keres Carter – What you say is partially correct, however the Greeks deserve at least some credit. Parts of the American democracy definately come from him
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I think the Greeks have been getting an enormous amount of credit for a very long time, while the contributions of the Indigenous people of the Americas have been totally whitewashed and stolen for a very, very long time. Trivial example, in my county there’s a dish called Brunswick Stew. The colonial slaveholder who owned a slave who made the dish for him is given credit for its invention. However, that was several generations after John Lawson described the dish in his journal that an Indian lady made for him in 1713 while exploring interior NC/VA, what was then still Indian Country. That sort of thing went on wholesale from stem to stern throughout the ‘invention’ of this country. On my dad’s side we’re Krajina Serbs and that process is exactly what the Croats who’ve stolen the land they’ve run us off of are doing with our culture, as we speak. They’re even claiming Tesla was their boy.
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So you dont think the Greeks should get any credit?
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We’ve already established that they have been given an enormous amount of credit for centuries. Why is this an either/or question? If I go on about ignored Native American contributions I’m negating the Greek? We don’t need to polarize this. I’m not negating Greek contributions, I’m just taking them for granted, which I think they can handle. With all the attention they’ve gotten through the ages by Western culture, they should be able to handle that, quite gracefully, and be more than willing to share the spotlight. And with the breadth of comprehension their minds have exhibited in the past, I’m sure they are more than capable of appreciating that necessity. What I am suggesting is that it’s no accident that the Greek ideals ‘suddenly’ became interesting to the West when it stumbled upon the Americas. And since they became engrossed in that process of conquering what they found instead of asking nicely to borrow from it they needed to cast it in the light of something they were rekindling from their own past, rather than give credit where credit was due. People do that in a heartbeat. Nasty business but it goes on all the time.
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[…] Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), known as Americus Vespucius in Latin, is the Italian explorer that America is named after. He called it the New World. While Columbus thought he was in the Indies, a part of Asia, Vespucci discovered that South America was not part of Asia at all but a new continent. He went on at least two voyages (1499-1500 and 1501-1502), maybe as many as four. He sailed for both Spain and Portugal. He explored the coast of South America from Venezuela to Patagonia in Argentina (I am using the present-day names). He was the first Western explorer to see the Amazon and Rio de la Plata. He went as far as 50 degrees south of the equator. He was looking for a passage to India, thinking that South America was the east coast of Asia. According to Ptolemy and Marco Polo the Asian coast turned west at the Cape of Catigara, at 8.5 degrees south of the equator. From there Vespucci hoped to sail on to Taprobane (Sri Lanka). But the coast went on and on and on, hardly ever turning. This was not Asia but some new continent." […]
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amerigo vespucci is a famous scientist , mai trọng nhuận said to me that amerigo was julius caesar or sakya muni in the past ,sangha at that time
organized a long adventure to the far east ,now italian nation is the best home
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^ please review comment policy. All non-English posts must be translated to English or they end up deleted.
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