amerigo vespucci first voyage map

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Amerigo Vespucci

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 6, 2024 | Original: July 31, 2023

Amerigo Vespucci was a 16th-century Italian merchant and explorer remembered not only for his voyages that altered the course of history but for bestowing the New World with the name “America.”

Vespucci’s mapping of coastlines and constellations, cultural observations and identification of equatorial ocean currents led to the realization that his travels had taken him to a new continent, challenging the previously held belief that Christopher Columbus had reached the uncharted eastern edge of Asia.

Early Life and Education

Born March 9, 1454, in Florence, Italy, during the height of the Renaissance , Vespucci came from a prominent family with ties to the Medici dynasty . His father, a government notary, and his uncle, respected humanist Dominican friar Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, played influential roles in his education. Immersed in a world of trade and maritime culture from a young age, Vespucci developed interests and aptitude in astronomy, math, navigation and foreign languages. 

Early in his career, Vespucci worked for the Medici family as a banker and later supervised ship operations in Seville, Spain. Accounts vary, but many believe that Vespucci met Christopher Columbus in Seville in 1496, after Columbus’s historic 1492 voyage, and assisted Columbus in preparing for future expeditions.

Did you know? Thefirst use of the name "America" was in 1507, when a new world map was created based on the explorations of Amerigo Vespucci.

Vespucci's Voyages

Fueled by his own passion for discovery, Vespucci joined a Spanish expedition while in his 40s, serving as an astronomer and mapmaker in search of a passage to India. Led by Spanish explorer Alonso de Ojeda, they set sail from Cadiz, Spain, in May 1499 and reached the northeastern coast of South America.

Despite their belief that they had arrived in Asia, Ojeda explored the coast of Venezuela while Vespucci ventured south to coastal Brazil. During the voyage, Vespucci charted the constellations, noting their differences from those seen in Europe. He also documented the diverse flora and fauna, made extensive observations about the indigenous tribes he encountered and described what he thought was the Ganges River, but is now known to be the mouth of the Amazon River . 

In a letter recounting the journey, he wrote of discovering “an infinite number of birds or various forms and colors and trees so beautiful and fragrant that we thought we had entered the earthly Paradise.” 

In May 1501, Vespucci embarked on another voyage, this time under the patronage of King Manuel I of Portugal , again seeking passage to India. Sailing along the Brazilian and Argentinian coasts, Vespucci ventured further south to present-day Rio de Janeiro and the La Plata River. Once again, he observed unfamiliar constellations, unexplained equatorial currents and an absence of the riches he expected to find in India. Realizing that he was not in India or on an undiscovered island but on a separate continent across the Atlantic Ocean, he dubbed the land Mundus Novus, or the New World.

There are varying accounts and unconfirmed reports of Vespucci undertaking a third voyage to the New World in 1503, also in the name of Portugal. 

Although Vespucci’s discoveries were not considered highly significant at the time, the publication of his correspondence with friends and colleagues chronicling his voyages, known as the “Vespucci Letters,” played a pivotal role in dispelling the belief that Columbus had reached Asia. The letters brought Vespucci fame (although some believe the letters are fake).

Vespucci's Namesake and Reputation

The term “America” first took shape in 1507, when German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller drew a map of the newly recognized continent and labeled it “Americus” in Vespucci’s honor. This map, often referred to as “America’s birth certificate,” marked the usage of the name “America.”

Vespucci, who became a naturalized citizen of Spain in 1505, was given the prestigious title of master navigator of Spain in 1508. Charged with training and recruiting navigators and managing the country’s map collections, he held the position until he died of malaria in Seville on February 22, 1512, at the age of 58.

“The Map That Named America,” U.S. Library of Congress “Amerigo Vespucci,” by Frederick A.Ober “Amerigo Vespucci: Italian explorer who named America,” LiveScience “ Amerigo Vespucci,” T he Martimers’ Museum and Park

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The Ages of Exploration

Amerigo vespucci interactive map, age of discovery.

Quick Facts:

Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages across the Atlantic helped prove that Columbus did not reach Asia, but instead found a New World to the Europeans

Click on the world map to view an example of the explorer’s voyage.

How to Use the Map

• Click on either the map icons or on the location name in the expanded column to view more information about that place or event

• Original "EXPLORATION through the AGES" site
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The Waldseemüller Map: Charting the New World

Two obscure 16th-century German scholars named the American continent and changed the way people thought about the world

Toby Lester

It was a curious little book. When a few copies began resurfacing, in the 18th century, nobody knew what to make of it. One hundred and three pages long and written in Latin, it announced itself on its title page as follows:

INTRODUCTION TO COSMOGRAPHY WITH CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF GEOMETRY AND ASTRONOMY NECESSARY FOR THIS MATTER

ADDITIONALLY, THE FOUR VOYAGES OF AMERIGO VESPUCCI

A DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD ON BOTH A GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION OF THOSE LANDS UNKNOWN TO PTOLEMY DISCOVERED BY RECENT MEN

The book—known today as the Cosmographiae Introductio , or Introduction to Cosmography —listed no author. But a printer's mark recorded that it had been published in 1507, in St. Dié, a town in eastern France some 60 miles southwest of Strasbourg, in the Vosges Mountains of Lorraine.

The word "cosmography" isn't used much today, but educated readers in 1507 knew what it meant: the study of the known world and its place in the cosmos. The author of the Introduction to Cosmo­graphy laid out the organization of the cosmos as it had been described for more than 1,000 years: the Earth sat motionless at the center, surrounded by a set of giant revolving concentric spheres. The Moon, the Sun and the planets each had their own sphere, and beyond them was the firmament, a single sphere studded with all of the stars. Each of these spheres wheeled grandly around the Earth at its own pace, in a never-ending celestial procession.

All of this was delivered in the dry manner of a textbook. But near the end, in a chapter devoted to the makeup of the Earth, the author elbowed his way onto the page and made an oddly personal announcement. It came just after he had introduced readers to Asia, Africa and Europe—the three parts of the world known to Europeans since antiquity. "These parts," he wrote, "have in fact now been more widely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard in what follows). Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this [new part] from being called Amerigen—the land of Amerigo, as it were—or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character."

How strange. With no fanfare, near the end of a minor Latin treatise on cosmography, a nameless 16th-century author briefly stepped out of obscurity to give America its name—and then disappeared again.

Those who began studying the book soon noticed something else mysterious. In an easy-to-miss paragraph printed on the back of a foldout diagram, the author wrote, "The purpose of this little book is to write a sort of introduction to the whole world that we have depicted on a globe and on a flat surface. The globe, certainly, I have limited in size. But the map is larger."

Various remarks made in passing throughout the book implied that this map was extraordinary. It had been printed on several sheets, the author noted, suggesting that it was unusually large. It had been based on several sources: a brand-new letter by Amerigo Vespucci (included in the Introduction to Cosmography ); the work of the second-century Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy; and charts of the regions of the western Atlantic newly explored by Vespucci, Columbus and others. Most significant, it depicted the New World in a dramatically new way. "It is found," the author wrote, "to be surrounded on all sides by the ocean."

This was an astonishing statement. Histories of New World discovery have long told us that it was only in 1513—after Vasco Núñez de Balboa had first caught sight of the Pacific by looking west from a mountain peak in Panama—that Europeans began to conceive of the New World as something other than a part of Asia. And it was only after 1520, once Magellan had rounded the tip of South America and sailed into the Pacific, that Europeans were thought to have confirmed the continental nature of the New World. And yet here, in a book published in 1507, were references to a large world map that showed a new, fourth part of the world and called it America.

The references were tantalizing, but for those studying the Introduction to Cosmography in the 19th century, there was an obvious problem. The book contained no such map.

Scholars and collectors alike began to search for it, and by the 1890s, as the 400th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage approached, the search had become a quest for the cartographical Holy Grail. "No lost maps have ever been sought for so diligently as these," Britain's Geographical Journal declared at the turn of the century, referring both to the large map and the globe. But nothing turned up. In 1896, the historian of discovery John Boyd Thacher simply threw up his hands. "The mystery of the map," he wrote, "is a mystery still."

On March 4, 1493, seeking refuge from heavy seas, a storm-battered caravel flying the Spanish flag limped into Portugal's Tagus River estuary. In command was one Christoforo Colombo, a Genoese sailor destined to become better known by his Latinized name, Christopher Columbus. After finding a suitable anchorage site, Columbus dispatched a letter to his sponsors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, reporting in exultation that after a 33-day crossing he had reached the Indies, a vast archipelago on the eastern outskirts of Asia.

The Spanish sovereigns greeted the news with excitement and pride, though neither they nor anybody else initially assumed that Columbus had done anything revolutionary. European sailors had been discovering new islands in the Atlantic for more than a century—the Canaries, the Madeiras, the Azores, the Cape Verde islands. People had good reason, based on the dazzling variety of islands that dotted the oceans of medieval maps, to assume that many more remained to be found.

Some people assumed that Columbus had found nothing more than a few new Canary Islands. Even if Columbus had reached the Indies, that didn't mean he had expanded Europe's geographical horizons. By sailing west to what appeared to be the Indies (but in actuality were the islands of the Caribbean), he had confirmed an ancient theory that nothing but a small ocean separated Europe from Asia. Columbus had closed a geographical circle, it seemed—making the world smaller, not larger.

But the world began to expand again in the early 1500s. The news first reached most Europeans in letters by Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine merchant who had taken part in at least two voyages across the Atlantic, one sponsored by Spain, the other by Portugal, and had sailed along a giant continental landmass that appeared on no maps of the time. What was sensational, even mind-blowing, about this newly discovered land was that it stretched thousands of miles beyond the Equator to the south . Printers in Florence jumped at the chance to publicize the news, and in late 1502 or early 1503 they printed a doctored version of one of Vespucci's letters, under the title Mundus Novus , or New World , in which he appeared to say that he'd discovered a new continent. The work quickly became a best seller.

"In the past," it began, "I have written to you in rather ample detail about my return from those new re­gions...and which can be called a new world, since our ancestors had no knowledge of them, and they are entirely new matter to those who hear about them. Indeed, it surpasses the opinion of our ancient authorities, since most of them assert that there is no continent south of the equator....[But] I have discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more numerous peoples and animals than in our Europe, or Asia or Africa."

This passage has been described as a watershed moment in European geographical thought—the moment at which a European first became aware that the New World was distinct from Asia. But "new world" didn't necessarily mean then what it means today. Europeans used it regularly to describe any part of the known world that they had not previously visited or seen described. In fact, in another letter, unambiguously attributed to Vespucci, he made clear where he thought he had been on his voyages. "We concluded," he wrote, "that this was continental land—which I esteem to be bounded by the eastern part of Asia."

In 1504 or so, a copy of the New World letter fell into the hands of an Alsatian scholar and poet named Matthias Ringmann. Then in his early 20s, Ringmann taught school and worked as a proofreader at a small printing press in Strasbourg, but he had a side interest in classical geography—specifically, the work of Ptolemy. In a work known as the Geography , Ptolemy had explained how to map the world in degrees of latitude and longitude, a system he had used to stitch together a comprehensive picture of the world as it was known in antiquity. His maps depicted most of Europe, the northern half of Africa and the western half of Asia, but they didn't, of course, include all the parts of Asia visited by Marco Polo in the 13th century, or the parts of southern Africa discovered by the Portuguese in the latter half of the 15th century.

When Ringmann came across the New World letter, he was immersed in a careful study of Ptolemy's Geography , and he recognized that Vespucci, unlike Columbus, appeared to have sailed south right off the edge of the world that Ptolemy had mapped. Thrilled, Ringmann printed his own version of the New World letter in 1505—and to emphasize the southness of Vespucci's discovery, he changed the work's title from New World to On the Southern Shore Recently Discovered by the King of Portugal , referring to Vespucci's sponsor, King Manuel.

Not long afterward, Ringmann teamed up with a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller to prepare a new edition of Ptolemy's Geography . Sponsored by René II, the Duke of Lorraine, Ringmann and Waldseemüller set up shop in the little French town of St. Dié, in the mountains just southwest of Strasbourg. Working as part of a small group of humanists and printers known as the Gymnasium Vosagense, the pair developed an ambitious plan. Their edition would include not only 27 definitive maps of the ancient world, as Ptolemy had described it, but also 20 maps showing the discoveries of modern Europeans, all drawn according to the principles laid out in the Geography —a historical first.

Duke René seems to have been instrumental in inspiring this leap. From unknown contacts he had received yet another Vespucci letter, also falsified, describing his voyages and at least one nautical chart depicting the new coastlines explored to date by the Portuguese. The letter and the chart confirmed to Ringmann and Waldseemüller that Vespucci had indeed discovered a huge unknown land across the ocean to the west, in the Southern Hemisphere.

What happened next is unclear. At some time in 1505 or 1506, Ringmann and Waldseemüller decided that the land Vespucci had explored was not a part of Asia. Instead, they concluded that it must be a new, fourth part of the world.

Temporarily setting aside their work on their Ptolemy atlas, Ringmann and Waldseemüller threw themselves into the production of a grand new map that would introduce Europe to this new idea of a four-part world. The map would span 12 separate sheets, printed from carefully carved wood blocks; when pasted together, the sheets would measure a stunning 4 1/2 by 8 feet—creating one of the largest printed maps, if not the largest, ever produced to that time. In April of 1507, they began printing the map, and would later report turning out 1,000 copies.

Much of what the map showed would have come as no surprise to Europeans familiar with geography. Its depiction of Europe and North Africa derived directly from Ptolemy; sub- Saharan Africa derived from recent Portuguese nautical charts; and Asia derived from the works of Ptolemy and Marco Polo. But on the left side of the map was something altogether new. Rising out of the formerly uncharted waters of the Atlantic, stretching almost from the map's top to its bottom, was a strange new landmass, long and thin and mostly blank—and there, written across what is known today as Brazil, was a strange new name: America.

Libraries today list Martin Waldseemüller as the author of the Introduction to Cosmography , but the book does not actually single him out as such. It includes opening dedications by both him and Ringmann, but these refer to the map, not the text—and Ringmann's dedication comes first. In fact, Ringmann's fingerprints are all over the work. The book's author, for instance, demonstrates a familiarity with ancient Greek—a language that Ringmann knew well but Waldseemüller did not. The author embellishes his writing with snatches of verse by Virgil, Ovid and other classical writers—a literary tic that characterizes all of Ringmann's writing. And the one contemporary writer mentioned in the book was a friend of Ringmann's.

Ringmann the writer, Waldsee­müller the mapmaker: the two men would team up in precisely this way in 1511, when Waldseemüller printed a grand map of Europe. Accompanying the map was a booklet titled Description of Europe , and in dedicating his map to Duke Antoine of Lorraine, Waldseemüller made clear who had written the book. "I humbly beg of you to accept with benevolence my work," he wrote, "with an explanatory summary prepared by Ringmann." He might just as well have been referring to the Introduction to Cosmography .

Why dwell on this arcane question of authorship? Because whoever wrote the Introduction to Cosmography was almost certainly the person who coined the name "America"—and here, too, the balance tilts in Ringmann's favor. The famous naming-of-America paragraph sounds a lot like Ringmann. He's known, for example, to have spent time mulling over the use of feminine names for concepts and places. "Why are all the virtues, the intellectual qualities and the sciences always symbolized as if they belonged to the feminine sex?" he would write in a 1511 essay. "Where does this custom spring from: a usage common not only to the pagan writers but also to the scholars of the church? It originated from the belief that knowledge is destined to be fertile of good works....Even the three parts of the old world received the name of women."

Ringmann reveals his hand in other ways. In both poetry and prose he regularly amused himself by making up words, by punning in different languages and by investing his writing with hidden meanings. The naming-of-America passage is rich in just this sort of wordplay, much of which requires a familiarity with Greek. The key to the whole passage, almost always overlooked, is the curious name Amerigen (which Ringmann quickly Latinizes and then feminizes to come up with America). To get Amerigen, Ringmann combined the name Amerigo with the Greek word gen, the accusative form of a word meaning "earth," and by doing so coined a name that means—as he himself explains—"land of Amerigo."

But the word yields other meanings. Gen can also mean "born" in Greek, and the word ameros can mean "new," making it possible to read Amerigen as not only "land of Amerigo" but also "born new"—a double-entendre that would have delighted Ringmann, and one that very nicely complements the idea of fertility that he associated with female names. The name may also contain a play on meros , a Greek word sometimes translated as "place." Here Amerigen becomes A-meri-gen, or "No-place-land"—not a bad way to describe a previously unnamed continent whose geography is still uncertain.

Copies of the Waldseemüller map began to appear at German universities in the decade after 1507; sketches of it and copies made by students and professors in Cologne, Tübingen, Leipzig and Vienna survive. The map clearly was getting around, as was the Introduction to Cosmography itself. The little book was reprinted several times and attracted acclaim across Europe, largely because of the long Vespucci letter.

What about Vespucci himself? Did he ever come across the map or the Introduction to Cosmography ? Did he ever learn that the New World had been named in his honor? The odds are that he did not. Neither the book nor the name is known to have made it to the Iberian Peninsula before he died, in Seville, in 1512. But both surfaced there soon afterward: the name America first appeared in Spain in a book printed in 1520, and Christopher Columbus' son Ferdinand, who lived in Spain, acquired a copy of the Introduction to Cosmography sometime before 1539. The Spanish didn't like the name, however. Believing that Vespucci had somehow named the New World after himself, usurping Columbus' rightful glory, they refused to put the name America on official maps and documents for two more centuries. But their cause was lost from the start. The name America, such a natural poetic counterpart to Asia, Africa and Europa, had filled a vacuum, and there was no going back, especially not after the young Gerardus Mercator, destined to become the century's most influential cartographer, decided that the whole of the New World, not just its southern part, should be so labeled. The two names he put on his 1538 world map are the ones we've used ever since: North America and South America.

Ringmann didn't have long to live after finishing the Introduction to Cosmography . By 1509 he was suffering from chest pains and exhaustion, probably from tuberculosis, and by the fall of 1511, not yet 30, he was dead. After Ringmann's death Waldseemüller continued to make maps, including at least three that depicted the New World, but never again did he depict it as surrounded by water, or call it America—more evidence that these ideas were Ringmann's. On one of his later maps, the Carta Marina of 1516—which identifies South America only as "Terra Nova"—Waldseemüller even issued a cryptic apology that seems to refer to his great 1507 map: "We will seem to you, reader, previously to have diligently presented and shown a representation of the world that was filled with error, wonder, and confusion.... As we have lately come to understand, our previous representation pleased very few people. Therefore, since true seekers of knowledge rarely color their words in confusing rhetoric, and do not embellish facts with charm but instead with a venerable abundance of simplicity, we must say that we cover our heads with a humble hood."

Waldseemüller produced no other maps after the Carta Marina, and some four years later, on March 16, 1520, in his mid-40s, he died—"dead without a will," a clerk would later write when recording the sale of his house in St. Dié.

During the decades that followed, copies of the 1507 map wore out or were discarded in favor of more up-to-date and better-printed maps, and by 1570 the map had all but vanished. One copy did survive, however. Sometime between 1515 and 1517, the Nuremberg mathematician and geographer Johannes Schöner acquired a copy and bound it into a beechwood-covered folio that he kept in his reference library. Between 1515 and 1520, Schöner studied the map carefully, but by the time he died, in 1545, he probably had not opened it in years. The map had begun its long sleep, which would last more than 350 years.

It was found again by accident, as happens so often with lost treasures. In the summer of 1901, freed from his teaching duties at Stella Matutina, a Jesuit boarding school in Feldkirch, Austria, Father Joseph Fischer set out for Germany. Balding, bespectacled and 44 years old, Fischer was a professor of history and geography. For seven years he had been haunting the public and private libraries of Europe in his spare time, hoping to find maps that showed evidence of the early Atlantic voyages of the Norsemen. This current trip was no exception. Earlier in the year, Fischer had received word that the impressive collection of maps and books at Wolfegg Castle, in southern Germany, included a rare 15th-century map that depicted Greenland in an unusual way. He had to travel only some 50 miles to reach Wolfegg, a tiny town in the rolling countryside just north of Austria and Switzerland, not far from Lake Constance. He reached the town on July 15, and upon his arrival at the castle, he would later recall, he was offered "a most friendly welcome and all the assistance that could be desired."

The map of Greenland turned out to be everything Fischer had hoped. As was his custom on research trips, after studying the map Fischer began a systematic search of the castle's entire collection. For two days he made his way through the inventory of maps and prints and spent hours immersed in the castle's rare books. And then, on July 17, his third day there, he walked over to the castle's south tower, where he had been told he would find a small second-floor garret containing what little he hadn't yet seen of the castle's collection.

The garret is a simple room. It's designed for storage, not show. Bookshelves line three of its walls from floor to ceiling, and two windows let in a cheery amount of sunlight. Wandering about the room and peering at the spines of the books on the shelves, Fischer soon came across a large folio with beechwood covers, bound together with finely tooled pigskin. Two Gothic brass clasps held the folio shut, and Fischer gently pried them open. On the inside cover he found a small bookplate, bearing the date 1515 and the name of the folio's original owner: Johannes Schöner. "Posterity," the inscription began, "Schöner gives this to you as an offering."

Fischer started leafing through the folio. To his amazement, he discovered that it contained not only a rare 1515 star chart engraved by the German artist Albrecht Dürer, but also two giant world maps. Fischer had never seen anything quite like them. In pristine condition, printed from intricately carved wood blocks, each one was made up of separate sheets that, if removed from the folio and assembled, would create maps approximately 4 1/2 by 8 feet in size.

Fischer began examining the first map in the folio. Its title, running in block letters across the bottom of the map, read, THE WHOLE WORLD ACCORDING TO THE TRADITION OF PTOLEMY AND THE VOYAGES OF AMERIGO VESPUCCI AND OTHERS. This language brought to mind the Introduction to Cosmography , a work Fischer knew well, as did the portraits of Ptolemy and Vespucci that he saw at the top of the map.

Could this be... the map? Fischer began to study it sheet by sheet. Its two center sheets, which showed Europe, northern Africa, the Middle East and western Asia, came straight from Ptolemy. Farther to the east, it presented the Far East as described by Marco Polo. Southern Africa reflected the nautical charts of the Portuguese.

It was an unusual mix of styles and sources: precisely the sort of synthesis, Fischer realized, that the Introduction to Cosmography had promised. But he began to get truly excited when he turned to the map's three western sheets. There, rising out of the sea and stretching from the top to bottom, was the New World, surrounded by water.

A legend at the bottom of the page corresponded verbatim to a paragraph in the Introduction to Cosmography . North America appeared on the top sheet, a runt version of its modern self. Just to the south lay a number of Caribbean islands, among them two big ones identified as Spagnolla and Isabella. A small legend read, "These islands were discovered by Columbus, an admiral of Genoa, at the command of the King of Spain." Moreover, the vast southern landmass stretching from above the Equator to the bottom of the map was labeled DISTANT UNKNOWN LAND. Another legend read THIS WHOLE REGION WAS DISCOVERED BY THE ORDER OF THE KING OF CASTILE. But what must have brought Fischer's heart to his mouth was what he saw on the bottom sheet: AMERICA.

The 1507 map! It had to be. Alone in the little garret in the tower of Wolfegg Castle, Father Fischer realized that he had discovered the most sought-after map of all time.

Fischer took the news of his discovery straight to his mentor, the renowned Innsbruck geographer Franz Ritter von Wieser. In the fall of 1901, after intense study, the two went public. The reception was ecstatic. "Geographical students in all parts of the world have awaited with the deepest interest details of this most important discovery," the Geographical Journal declared, breaking the news in a February 1902 essay, "but no one was probably prepared for the gigantic cartographical monster which Prof. Fischer has now awakened from so many centuries of peaceful slumber." On March 2 the New York Times followed suit: "There has lately been made in Europe one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of cartography," its report read.

Interest in the map grew. In 1907, the London-based bookseller Henry Newton Stevens Jr., a leading dealer in Americana, secured the rights to put the 1507 map up for sale during its 400th-anniversary year. Stevens offered it as a package with the other large Waldseemüller map—the Carta Marina of 1516, which had also been bound into Schöner's folio—for $300,000, or about $7 million in today's currency. But he found no takers. The 400th anniversary passed, two world wars and the cold war engulfed Europe, and the Waldseemüller map, left alone in its tower garret, went to sleep for another century.

Today, at last, the map is awake again—this time, it would appear, for good. In 2003, after years of negotiation with the owners of Wolfegg Castle and the German government, the Library of Congress acquired it for $10 million. On April 30, 2007, almost exactly 500 years after its making, German Chancellor Angela Merkel officially transferred the map to the United States. That December, the Library of Congress put it on permanent display in its grand Jefferson Building, where it is the centerpiece of an exhibit titled "Exploring the Early Americas."

As you move through it, you pass a variety of priceless cultural artifacts made in the pre-Columbian Americas, and a choice selection of original texts and maps dating from the period of first contact between the New World and the Old. Finally you arrive at an inner sanctum, and there, reunited with the Introduction to Cosmography , the Carta Marina and a few other select geographical treasures, is the Waldseemüller map. The room is quiet, the lighting dim. To study the map you have to move close and peer carefully through the glass—and when you do, it begins to tell its stories.

Adapted from The Fourth Part of the World , by Toby Lester. © 2009 Toby Lester. Published by the Free Press. Reproduced with permission.

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Amerigo Vespucci

America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator and explorer who played a prominent role in exploring the New World.

(1451-1512)

Who Was Amerigo Vespucci?

On May 10, 1497, explorer Amerigo Vespucci embarked on his first voyage. On his third and most successful voyage, he discovered present-day Rio de Janeiro and Rio de la Plata. Believing he had discovered a new continent, he called South America the New World. In 1507, America was named after him. He died of malaria in Seville, Spain, on February 22, 1512.

Navigator and explorer Amerigo Vespucci, the third son in a cultured family, was born on March 9, 1451, (some scholars say 1454) in Florence, Italy. Although born in Italy, Vespucci became a naturalized citizen of Spain in 1505.

Vespucci and his parents, Ser Nastagio and Lisabetta Mini, were friends of the wealthy and tempestuous Medici family, who ruled Italy from the 1400s to 1737. Vespucci's father worked as a notary in Florence. While his older brothers headed off to the University of Pisa in Tuscany, Vespucci received his early education from his paternal uncle, a Dominican friar named Giorgio Antonio Vespucci.

When Vespucci was in his early 20s, another uncle, Guido Antonio Vespucci, gave him one of the first of his many jobs. Guido Antonio Vespucci, who was ambassador of Florence under King Louis XI of France, sent his nephew on a brief diplomatic mission to Paris. The trip likely awakened Vespucci's fascination with travel and exploration.

Before Exploration

In the years before Vespucci embarked on his first voyage of exploration, he held a string of other jobs. When Vespucci was 24 years old, his father pressured him to go into business. Vespucci obliged. At first he undertook a variety of business endeavors in Florence. Later, he moved on to a banking business in Seville, Spain, where he formed a partnership with another man from Florence, named Gianetto Berardi. According to some accounts, from 1483 to 1492, Vespucci worked for the Medici family. During that time he is said to have learned that explorers were looking for a northwest passage through the Indies.

According to a letter that Vespucci might or might not have truly written, on May 10, 1497, he embarked on his first journey, departing from Cadiz with a fleet of Spanish ships. The controversial letter indicates that the ships sailed through the West Indies and made their way to the mainland of Central America within approximately five weeks. If the letter is authentic, this would mean that Vespucci discovered Venezuela a year before Columbus did. Vespucci and his fleets arrived back in Cadiz in October 1498.

In May 1499, sailing under the Spanish flag, Vespucci embarked on his next expedition, as a navigator under the command of Alonzo de Ojeda. Crossing the equator, they traveled to the coast of what is now Guyana, where it is believed that Vespucci left Ojeda and went on to explore the coast of Brazil. During this journey Vespucci is said to have discovered the Amazon River and Cape St. Augustine.

On May 14, 1501, Vespucci departed on another trans-Atlantic journey. Now on his third voyage, Vespucci set sail for Cape Verde — this time in service to King Manuel I of Portugal. Vespucci's third voyage is largely considered his most successful. While Vespucci did not start out commanding the expedition, when Portuguese officers asked him to take charge of the voyage he agreed. Vespucci's ships sailed along the coast of South America from Cape São Roque to Patagonia. Along the way, they discovered present-day Rio de Janeiro and Rio de la Plata. Vespucci and his fleets headed back via Sierra Leone and the Azores. Believing he had discovered a new continent, in a letter to Florence, Vespucci called South America the New World. His claim was largely based on Columbus' earlier conclusion: In 1498, when passing the mouth of the Orinoco River, Columbus had determined that such a big outpouring of fresh water must come from land "of continental proportions." Vespucci decided to start recording his accomplishments, writing that accounts of his voyages would allow him to leave "some fame behind me after I die."

On June 10, 1503, sailing again under the Portuguese flag, Vespucci, accompanied by Gonzal Coelho, headed back to Brazil. When the expedition didn't make any new discoveries, the fleet disbanded. To Vespucci's chagrin, the commander of the Portuguese ship was suddenly nowhere to be found. Despite the circumstances, Vespucci forged ahead, managing to discover Bahia and the island of South Georgia in the process. Soon after, he was forced to prematurely abort the voyage and return to Lisbon, Portugal, in 1504.

There is some speculation as to whether Vespucci made additional voyages. Based on Vespucci's accounts, some historians believe that he embarked on a fifth and sixth voyage with Juan de la Cosa, in 1505 and 1507, respectively. Other accounts indicate that Vespucci's fourth journey was his last.

America's Namesake

In 1507, some scholars at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in northern France were working on a geography book called Cosmographiæ Introductio , which contained large cut-out maps that the reader could use to create his or her own globes. German cartographer Martin Waldseemüler, one of the book's authors, proposed that the newly discovered Brazilian portion of the New World be labeled America, the feminine version of the name Amerigo, after Amerigo Vespucci. The gesture was his means of honoring the person who discovered it, and indeed granted Vespucci the legacy of being America's namesake.

Decades later, in 1538, the mapmaker Mercator, working off the maps created at St-Dié, chose to mark the name America on both the northern and the southern parts of the continent, instead of just the southern portion. While the definition of America expanded to include more territory, Vespucci seemed to gain credit for areas that most would agree were actually first discovered by Columbus.

Final Years and Death

In 1505, Vespucci, who was born and raised in Italy, became a naturalized citizen of Spain. Three years later, he was awarded the office of piloto mayor , or master navigator, of Spain. In this role, Vespucci's job was to recruit and train other navigators, as well as to gather data on continued New World exploration. Vespucci held the position for the remainder of his life.

On February 22, 1512, Vespucci died of malaria in Seville, Spain.

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• Name: Amerigo Vespucci
• Birth Year: 1451
• Birth City: Florence
• Birth Country: Italy
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator and explorer who played a prominent role in exploring the New World.
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• Death Year: 1512
• Death City: Seville
• Death Country: Spain

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Amerigo Vespucci

Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) grew up in the shadow of Renaissance humanism at the court of the powerful Medici family in Florence. He was born into a family of wealth and well-connected merchants and notaries, who enjoyed Medici patronage. His uncle, Georgio Antonio Vespucci, was a humanist scholar and teacher who played an important role in Amerigo's education. The adult Vespucci traveled to Seville as the Medici's agent, and it was here that he met Christopher Columbus. In addition to outfitting a fleet for the Spanish crown, Vespucci also outfitted the ships for Columbus' third voyage across the Atlantic in 1498.

In the early 15th century, the Portuguese crown began sponsoring expeditions into the Atlantic that gradually worked their way down the western coast of Africa. In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias (ca. 1450-1500) rounded the Cape of Good Hope at Africa's southern tip, proving that traveling eastward by sea was a viable route, later substantiated by Vasco da Gama (ca. 1460-1524), who commanded the first ships to sail directly from Europe to India.

An expeditor and entrepreneur whose yearning for adventure may have been inspired by Christopher Columbus, Vespucci became enamored of the idea of exploration. On the eve of the 16th century, he decided to leave his comfortable city life and take up the challenge of the high seas. He wrote: "I resolved to abandon trade, and to aspire to something more praiseworthy and enduring. So it came about that I arranged to go to see a portion of the world and its marvels." In 1499 he joined the expedition of Alonso de Ojeda on behalf of Spain to further explore the new territory brought to European attention by Columbus. In 1501, Vespucci sailed to the new world again, this time for Portugal. Numerous letters describing his adventures, both in manuscript and in print, which have been attributed to Vespucci or to his admirers, have been called into question by scholars. Of the four voyages published by the St. Dié humanists in   Cosmographiae Introductio , modern scholars are convinced of the legitimacy of only one: that which he took with Alonso de Ojeda. However, it was his next voyage, which he undertook for Portugal, that was recounted in a letter of 1502 and published for the first time as  Mundus Novus  [ New World ] at Paris in 1503, with many subsequent editions. Mathias Ringman, one of the St. Dié scholars, published an edition of this text in 1505,   De ora Antarctica per regem Portugallie pridem inventa , shortly before he joined the Gymnasium. Despite the doubt cast by scholars on these various accounts and on the nature of Vespucci's achievements, it took real courage for Vespucci-who had no prior experience at sea and whose knowledge of navigation was entirely theoretical-to undertake the grand adventure of sailing out into uncharted seas

Amerigo Vespucci, Italian Explorer and Cartographer

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Amerigo Vespucci (March 9, 1454–February 22, 1512) was an Italian explorer and cartographer. In the early 16th century, he showed that the New World was not part of Asia but was, in fact, its own distinct area. The Americas take their name from the Latin form of "Amerigo."

Fast Facts: Amerigo Vespucci

• Known For: Vespucci's expeditions led him to the realization that the New World was distinct from Asia; the Americas were named after him.
• Born: March 9, 1454 in Florence, Italy
• Parents: Ser Nastagio Vespucci and Lisabetta Mini
• Died: February 22, 1512 in Seville, Spain
• Spouse: Maria Cerezo

Amerigo Vespucci was born on March 9, 1454, to a prominent family in Florence, Italy. As a young man, he read widely and collected books and maps. He eventually began working for local bankers and was sent to Spain in 1492 to look after his employer's business interests.

While he was in Spain, Vespucci had the chance to meet Christopher Columbus , who had just returned from his voyage to America; the meeting increased Vespucci's interest in taking a journey across the Atlantic. He soon began working on ships, and he went on his first expedition in 1497. The Spanish ships passed through the West Indies, reached South America, and returned to Spain the following year. In 1499, Vespucci went on his second voyage, this time as an official navigator. The 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 New World

On his third 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. Along the way, the Portuguese sailors in charge of the voyage asked Vespucci to take over as commander.

While he was on this expedition, 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 a separate landmass from Asia. (Christopher Columbus mistakenly believed he had reached Asia.) In one letter , dated March (or April) 1503, Vespucci described the diversity of life on the new continent:

We knew that land to be a continent, and not an island, from its long beaches extending without trending round, the infinite number of inhabitants, the numerous tribes and peoples, the numerous kinds of wild animals unknown in our country, and many others never seen before by us, touching which it would take long to make reference.

In his writings, Vespucci also described the culture of the indigenous people , focusing 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 sold much better than Columbus's own diaries). Vespucci's descriptions of the natives were vivid and frank:

They are people gentle and tractable, and all of both sexes go naked, not covering any part of their bodies, just as they came from their mothers’ wombs, and so they go until their deaths...They are of a free and good-looking expression of countenance, which they themselves destroy by boring the nostrils and lips, the nose and ears...They stop up these perforations with blue stones, bits of marble, of crystal, or very fine alabaster, also with very white bones and other things.

Vespucci also described the richness of the land, and hinted that the region could be easily exploited for its valuable raw materials, including gold and pearls:

The land is very fertile, abounding in many hills and valleys, and in large rivers, and is irrigated by very refreshing springs. It is covered with extensive and dense forests...No kind of metal has been found except gold, in which the country abounds, though we have brought none back in this our first navigation. The natives, however, assured us that there was an immense quantity of gold underground, and nothing was to be had from them for a price. Pearls abound, as I wrote to you.

Scholars are not certain whether or not Vespucci participated in a fourth voyage to the Americas in 1503. If he did, there is little record of it, and we can assume the expedition was not very successful. Nevertheless, Vespucci did assist in the planning of other voyages to the New World.

European colonization of this region accelerated in the years after Vespucci's voyages, resulting in settlements in Mexico, the West Indies, and South America. The Italian explorer's work played an important role in helping colonizers navigate the territory.

Vespucci was named pilot-major of Spain in 1508. He was proud of this accomplishment, writing that "I was more skillful than all the shipmates of the whole world." Vespucci contracted malaria and died in Spain in 1512 at the age of 57.

The German clergyman-scholar Martin Waldseemüller liked to make up names. He even created his own last name by combining the words for "wood," "lake," and "mill." Waldseemüller was working on a contemporary world map in 1507, based on the Greek geography of Ptolemy , 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 this 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 sold 1,000 copies of the map across Europe.

Within a few years, Waldseemüller had changed his mind about the name for the New World—but it was too late. The name America had stuck. Gerardus Mercator's world map of 1538 was the first to include North America and South America. Vespucci's legacy lives on through the continents named in his honor.

• Fernández-Armesto Felipe. "Amerigo: the Man Who Gave His Name to America." Random House, 2008.
• Vespucci, Amerigo. “The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci.” Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) .
• Amerigo Vespucci, Explorer and Navigator
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• A Timeline of North American Exploration: 1492–1585
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Amerigo Vespucci, a Lurid Pamphlet and the Naming of America

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On permanent display in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is an enormous, 500-year-old world map that was the very first to use the name "America." It's the only surviving copy of what's known as the 1507 Waldseemüller Map , a priceless historical artifact discovered in the basement of a German castle in 1901 and purchased by the Library of Congress for $10 million in 2003.

"It's the birth certificate of America," says Chet Van Duzer, a mapmaking historian who has worked with the Library of Congress and is now affiliated with the Lazarus Project , which uses multi-spectral imaging to recover and decipher ancient documents.

But equally as fascinating as the 1507 map is the one that's mounted next to it at the Library of Congress, the Carta Marina of 1516 . This world map was published just nine years later by the very same man, Martin Waldseemüller, but the word "America" is nowhere to be found. In its place is simply " Terra Nova " or "New World."

"The most amazing thing about the name 'America' is that the guy who invented it decided it wasn't the right name," says Van Duzer.

Amerigo Vespucci, the Self-Promoter

Mapping the 'land of amerigo', a humbling correction, but too late.

Everyone knows that Christopher Columbus "discovered" America in 1492, even though he never set foot in North America and died insisting that he had found a Western route to Asia. So why didn't the makers of the 1507 Waldseemüller map name the newly discovered lands "Columbia" instead of "America"?

Probably because Columbus didn't write a best-selling pamphlet about his travels full of sex, violence and naked cannibals like his fellow Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed to the New World a decade after Columbus.

"Vespucci was a better self-promoter than Columbus," says Van Duzer, "and his accounts are more lurid, shall we say, than Columbus's, so they were reprinted more often."

Vespucci published two wildly popular accounts of his voyages to the New World. The first, written in 1504, was called " Mondus Novis " and clearly asserted Vespucci's claim that the lands across the Atlantic were indeed a new continent, not an extension of Asia or just a big island.

"For this transcends the view held by our ancients... that there is no continent to the south beyond the equator, but only the sea which they named the Atlantic," wrote Vespucci. "But that this their opinion is false and utterly opposed to the truth, this my last voyage has made manifest; for in those southern parts I have found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa." By following the South American coast to just 400 miles (643 kilometers) short of Tierra Del Fuego, Vespucci was convinced that he was traveling around a new continent.

"Mondus Novis" also included plenty of colorful details about the "curious natives," whom Vespucci depicted as gentle and almost childlike in nature, but nevertheless barbarous and decidedly un-Christian in their customs, which included facial piercings, cannibalism and sexual promiscuity.

A second pamphlet known as the " Soderini Letter ," which may not have been written entirely by Vespucci, made the rounds in 1505. The disputed text doubled down on Vespucci's descriptions of the naked locals and provided play-by-play accounts of a few violent clashes between Vespucci's men and the more aggressive tribes.

In one "laughable affair," Vespucci’s men welcomed some of the more adventurous Indians onto their ship where the Europeans decided to "fire off some of our great guns."

"[A]nd when the explosion took place, most of them through fear cast themselves (into the sea) to swim, not otherwise than frogs on the margins of a pond, when they see something that frightens them, will jump into the water, just so did those people," wrote Vespucci. "[A]nd those who remained in the ships were so terrified that we regretted our action."

Vespucci's accounts were widely read throughout Europe, including the small village of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in Lorraine, France, where mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller and his collaborator Matthias Ringmann were compiling an ambitious new map of the world.

As the historians William Connell and Stanislao Pugliese note in " The Routledge History of Italian Americans ," when Waldseemüller and Ringmann got their hands on Vespucci's Soderini Letter in 1507, "the two men believed it to be the latest word on the discoveries in the western ocean."

Waldseemüller and Ringmann had undoubtedly heard of Columbus, but were unimpressed. At the top of their giant 1507 map, which measures 4.2 feet by 7.6 feet (1.28 meters by 2.33 meters), they engraved portraits of the two men they believed to be the two greatest geographers of the ancient and modern world: the Greek mathematician Ptolemy and our friend Vespucci.

In a text that accompanied the 1507 Waldseemüller Map, the two men explained exactly why they named the new continent, which is modern-day South America, after Vespucci.

"[A]nd the fourth part of the earth, which, because Amerigo discovered it, we may call Amerige, the land of Amerigo, so to speak, or America."

Waldseemüller and Ringmann named the continent America "because Amerigo discovered it." Case closed.

It didn't take long for Waldseemüller and Ringmann to realize their mistake. But since 16th-century mapmaking and printmaking was a painstakingly slow process, it took a full nine years — downright speedy in those days — for the men to publish a corrected map, the Carta Marina of 1516, along with a wordy mea culpa.

In the Carta Marina of 1516, the name America is gone, substituted with "Terra Nova." Presumably the men had figured out that Columbus, not Vespucci, was the true discoverer of America. But by 1516, at least six other world maps had been published using the name America. And despite Waldseemüller and Ringmann's belated retraction, the original name stuck.

America was America from then on.

Unlike Columbus, Vespucci didn't attempt to rule over a New World colony and kill thousands of people in the process, but he wasn't a saint, either. Vespucci wrote that he returned from his first voyage with "222 captive slaves" whom he sold upon arrival in the Spanish port of Cadiz.

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A Voyage Westward: Amerigo Vespucci and a Whole New World

Historical questions remain, but vespucci's voyages defined the "new world" as we know it..

Amerigo Vespucci (born March 9, 1454; died Feb. 22, 1512) was an Italian  explorer , financier , navigator and cartographer . Born in the Republic of Florence , he became a naturalized citizen of the Crown of Castile in 1505.

Vespucci first demonstrated, in about 1502, that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia’s eastern outskirts, as initially believed during  Columbus’ voyages , but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass unknown to people of the Old World . Colloquially referred to as the New World , it came to be termed “ the Americas “, a name derived from Americus , the Latin version of Vespucci’s first name .

In April 1495, the Crown of Castile broke their monopoly deal with Christopher Columbus and began handing out licenses to other navigators for the West Indies .

At the invitation of king Manuel I of Portugal , Vespucci participated as observer in several voyages that explored the east coast of South America between 1499 and 1502. On the first of these voyages he was aboard the ship that discovered that South America extended much further south than previously thought.

The expeditions became widely known in Europe after two accounts attributed to Vespucci were published between 1502 and 1504. In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the new continent America after the feminine Latin version of Vespucci’s first name. In an accompanying book, Waldseemüller published one of the Vespucci accounts, which led to criticism that Vespucci was trying to upset Christopher Columbus ‘ glory. However, the rediscovery in the 18th century of other letters by Vespucci has led to the view that the early published accounts, notably the Soderini Letter , could be fabrications, not by Vespucci, but by others.

In 1508, the position of chief of navigation of Spain ( piloto mayor de Indias ) was created for Vespucci, with the responsibility of planning navigation for voyages to the Indies.

Two letters attributed to Vespucci were published during his lifetime. Mundus Novus (New World) was a Latin translation of a lost Italian letter sent from Lisbon to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. It describes a voyage to South America in 1501–1502. Mundus Novus was published in late 1502 or early 1503 and soon reprinted and distributed in numerous European countries.

Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (Letter of Amerigo Vespucci concerning the isles newly discovered on his four voyages), known as Lettera al Soderini or just Lettera , was a letter in Italian addressed to Piero Soderini . Printed in 1504 or 1505, it claimed to be an account of four voyages to the Americas made by Vespucci between 1497 and 1504. A Latin translation was published by the German Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 in Cosmographiae Introductio , a book on cosmography and geography , as Quattuor Americi Vespucij navigationes (Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci).

On March 22, 1508, King Ferdinand made Vespucci chief navigator of Spain and commissioned him to found a school of navigation, in order to standardize and modernize navigation techniques used by Iberian sea captains then exploring the world. Vespucci even developed a rudimentary, but fairly accurate method of determining longitude (which only more accurate chronometers would later improve upon).

In the 18th century, three unpublished familiar letters from Vespucci to Lorenzo de’ Medici were rediscovered. One describes a voyage made in 1499–1500 which corresponds with the second of the “four voyages”. Another was written from Cape Verde in 1501 in the early part of the third of the four voyages, before crossing the Atlantic. The third letter was sent from Lisbon after the completion of that voyage.

Some have suggested that Vespucci, in the two letters published in his lifetime, was exaggerating his role and constructed deliberate fabrications. However, many scholars now believe that the two letters were not written by him but were fabrications by others based in part on genuine letters by Vespucci. It was the publication and widespread circulation of the letters that might have led Waldseemüller to name the new continent America on his world map of 1507 in Lorraine . The book accompanying the map stated: “I do not see what right any one would have to object to calling this part, after Americus who discovered it and who is a man of intelligence, Amerige, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women”. It is possible that Vespucci was not aware that Waldseemüller had named the continent after him.

The two disputed letters claim that Vespucci made four voyages to America, while at most two can be verified from other sources. At the moment, there is a dispute between historians on when Vespucci visited the mainland the first time. Some historians, like Germán Arciniegas and Gabriel Camargo Pérez, think that his first voyage was made in June 1497 with the Spanish pilot Juan de la Cosa .

Vespucci’s real historical importance may well rest more in his letters, whether he wrote them all or not, than in his discoveries. From these letters, the European public learned about the newly discovered continents of the Americas for the first time; their existence became generally known throughout Europe within a few years of the letters’ publication. In Vespucci’s words:

“…concerning my return from those new regions which we found and explored … we may rightly call a new world. Because our ancestors had no knowledge of them, and it will be a matter wholly new to all those who hear about them, for this transcends the view held by our ancients, inasmuch as most of them hold that there is no continent to the south beyond the equator, but only the sea which they named the Atlantic and if some of them did aver that a continent there was, they denied with abundant argument that it was a habitable land. But that this their opinion is false and utterly opposed to the truth … my last voyage has made manifest; for in those southern parts I have found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe Asia or Africa, and, in addition, a climate milder and more delightful than in any other region known to us, as you shall learn in the following account.”

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• Amerigo Vespucci / Famous Explorers

Amerigo Vespucci’s Greatest Achievements and Voyages

by World History Edu · November 4, 2021

Amerigo Vespucci – biography and achievements

Amerigo Vespucci, a Florence, Italy-born navigator, merchant, and explorer, was one of the most renowned European explorers of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. And did you know that the name of the Americas was obtained from Amerigo Vespucci’s name?

What impact did this Italian-born explorer have on the world of exploration and the New World? And what were some of his greatest discoveries?

Below, World History Edu takes a quick look at the life and major achievements of Amerigo Vespucci.

Quick facts about Amerigo Vespucci

Date of birth : c. 1454

Place of birth : Florence, Republic of Florence (present-day Italy)

Died : February 22, 1512

Place of death : Sevilla, Crown of Castile (present-day Spain)

Mother : Lisa di Giovanni Mini

Father : Nostagio Vespucci

Siblings : Antonio and Girolamo

Most famous for : His voyages to the New World; Lending his name to the name of “America”

Major achievements of Amerigo Vespucci

During his illustrious career in exploration and navigation, Amerigo Vespucci was able to accomplish a lot of outstanding things. Some of his major accomplishments are as follows:

A member of the delegation sent by influential Italian family Medici to visit the king of France

Amerigo Vespucci’s family had a cordial relation with the very influential Florentine family named the Medici family. Lorenzo de’ Medici, a member of the Medici family, was in effect the de facto ruler of Florence for many years.

To secure French support for Florence’s war with Naples, the Medici family in Florence sent a diplomatic delegation to France’s Louis XI (reign- 1461-1483), also known as “Louis the Prudent”. Vespucci was perhaps an attaché or private secretary of the delegation. Although the Louis did not want commit, Vespucci returned to Florence having gained a good deal of experience.

Amerigo Vespucci’s influences (from left to right): Strabo (c. 64 BC- c. 24 AD), Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100-170 AD), and Italian mathematician and cosmographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1398-1482).

Helped in the preparations for Columbus’s voyages to the New World

Proving himself a capable and well-educated man, Amerigo Vespucci gained the trust Medici family members such as Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who a former classmate of Amerigo.

Steadily, Vespucci came to be assigned to Giannotto Berardi to help in the preparations for Christopher Columbus ’s third expeditions to the New World. He was also involved in preparing many other explorers for their voyages.

By the mid-1490s, he had risen to become the head of the Sevilla agency for Giovanni Medici.

Following the death of Giannotto Berardi in 1495, Vespucci was appointed the manager of the Medici Sevilla agency in Spain, where he helped organize a number of voyages for explorers, including Christopher Columbus. | Possible portrait of Lorenzo (1463-1503), by Sandro Botticelli

Vespucci popularized the discoveries made in the New World

His booklets in 1503 and 1505 about his voyages to the New World received critical acclaim across Europe. His reports helped to a large extent in making popular the discoveries that were made by European explorers at the time. They also boosted his reputation as a renowned navigator and explorer of the Age of Discovery (1400 to 1700 AD).

Amerigo Vespucci coined the term “New World” in 1503

Vespucci made popular the use of the term “New World” across Europe. | Sebastian Münster’s map of the New World, first published in 1540

In his 1503 letter – which was written to his friend and former employer Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de’ Medici – he used the term “New World” to refer to the Western Hemisphere that had become a popular destination for many European navigators and explorers. In the letter, which was later published in 1503 in Latin with the title Mundus Novus , Vespucci also makes mention of his voyage to Brazil in 1501-1502.

Vespucci strongly believed (and rightly so) that the Western Hemisphere lands discovered by navigators from Europe were not the edges of Asia, instead they were part of an entirely different continent. He came to that conclusion during his voyage to present-day Brazil in 1501. | Image: Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus, Letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici in 1502/1503

Amerigo Vespucci’s letters

It is worth mentioning that there exist two series of documents on the various voyages (from 1497 to 1504) taken by Amerigo Vespucci. Those two documents are sometimes all that scholars have to understanding the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci to the New World.

The first document was a letter from Vespucci to Piero di Tommaso Soderini, the gonfalonier (an Italian magistrate). The letter, which was dated September 4, 1504, was written in Italian. Known as the Soderini letter, the document was published in Florence in 1505. It claims that Vespucci embarked upon four voyages in total. However, some modern historians and scholars have questioned the authorship and reliability of the letter. Regardless, the Soderini letter proved very useful when it came to naming the American continent. Also, two Latin versions of the letter appeared in works “Quattuor americi navigations” and “Mundus Novus”.

The second series of documents mentions two voyages by Amerigo Vespucci. The documents are made up of three private letters addressed to Vespucci’s former employer and patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici.

Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages (1497-1504)

Although still a subject of immense debate, Amerigo Vespucci’s first two voyages to the New World are alleged to have taken place in the late 1490s.

According to a 1504 letter he allegedly penned to a Florentine official named Piero di Tommaso Soderini, Vespucci first sailed to the New World on May 10, 1497. The voyage, which was licensed by the Crown of Castile, saw Vespucci act as a navigator. The voyage had Juan de la Cosa as the chief navigator, while Alonso de Ojeda served as the commander. The goal was to explore the area where Christopher Columbus had reported seeing pearls during his third voyage.

Because the Soderini letter is the only documentation that talks about this voyage, some scholars have opined that the Vespucci never made such voyages. They go on to state that the letter was most likely a forgery. | Image: Amerigo Vespucci’s second voyage depicted in the first known edition of his letter to Piero Soderini, published by Pietro Pacini in Florence c.1505

To this day, it remains a bit unclear as to the exact role of Vespucci during the voyage. It is possible that he served as a commercial representative of the financiers of the voyage. Some scholars state that he was a navigator on the expedition that saw four ships set sail from Spain in 1499.

The expedition first stopped in the Canary Islands and then sailed to South America. When they arrived at the coast of French Guyana or Surinam, Captain Ojeda split the expedition team into two and headed northwest to modern day Venezuela, while Vespucci team sailed south. Vespucci was part of the team that discovered the mouth of the Amazon River. They then went as far as Cape St. Augustine (latitude about 6° S) before making their way past Trinidad, seeing the mouth of the Orinoco River before heading to Haiti. After making a stop at the Spanish colony at Hispaniola in the West Indies, the team returned to Spain in June 1500.

Amerigo Vespucci’s second voyage of 1501-1502

Upon returning to Spain, Vespucci proposed a voyage to the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of the Ganges (present day Bay of Bengal), and Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka). Unfortunately, his proposal was turned down by the Spanish government. Not wanting to dwell too much on the rejection, Vespucci decided to go into the service of Portugal and embark upon his second voyage.

Vespucci’s 1501-1502 voyage was licensed and supported by Manuel I of Portugal. The pilot for the voyage was Portuguese explorer Gonçalo Coelho, who was tasked to investigate a landmass far to the west in the Atlantic Ocean. Portugal had wanted to determine the extent of Portuguese nobleman and navigator and explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral’s discovery which was far to the west in the Atlantic Ocean (near present-day Brazil). The voyage was intended to allow Porrtugal to claim the land to the east of the line established by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).

With a total of three ships, Vespucci sailed from Lisbon, Portugal on May 13, 1501. They went through the Cape Verde Islands for resupply before journeying southwestward. In August 1501, the expedition made it to the coast of Brazil and then proceeded to Cape St. Augustine. They continued southward, coming into contact with Guanabara Bay (Rio de Janeiro’s bay). The crew named the bay Rio de Janeiro because it was January 1, 1502.

By going as far as Rio de la Plata in January 1502, Vespucci and the crew became the first European to find the estuary. Before setting sail back home, they passed by the coast of Patagonia (in present-day southern Argentina).

His alleged third voyage (1503-1504)

Vespucci’s third voyage came under the auspices of his Portuguese employers in 1503. However, there are some scholars that claim that the Italian explorer never made such voyage.

Those who support his claims of his third voyage cite a letter he wrote to Soderini. In the letter, it was mentioned that Vespucci travelled to the east coast of Brazil. Not much detail is known about the voyage. It must be noted that the expedition did not do much to advance the knowledge at the time.

The name “America” was derived from Amerigo Vespucci’s name

Around 1000 AD, the Vikings, under the leadership of Norse explorer Leif Erikson, “discovered” the continent of America. Half a millennium later Christopher Columbus’ expeditions would introduce Europeans to many Caribbean and Central American islands.

And somehow, Amerigo Vespucci’s name is the name given to the continent. That was due to the work of German cartographers and humanists Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470-1520) and Matthias Ringmann (1482-1511), who named those “discovered” land areas after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

The word “America” appeared for the first time in 1507 in Waldseemüller and Ringmann’s pamphlet titled “Cosmographiae Introductio” ( Introduction to Cosmography ). After and a new world map drawn by Waldseemüller. The pamphlet also made its way into the Latin translation of the Soderini letter.

A thousand copies of the world map were printed with the title Universal Geography According to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Contributions of Amerigo Vespucci and Others. | Image: Waldseemüller map from 1507 is the first map to include the name “America” and the first to depict the Americas as separate from Asia. The name initially applied only to South America, but it later extended to North and Central America.  

The name “America” was derived from the Latinized first name of Amerigo Vespucci. German cartographers and humanists Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470-1520) and Matthias Ringmann (1482-1511) used named the continent in honor of the invaluable contributions made by Vespucci.

Waldseemüller (c. 1470-1520) was also the first to map South America as a continent separate from Asia, the first to produce a printed globe and the first to create a printed wall map of Europe. After the publication of Waldseemüller’s work in 1507, other cartographers followed suit, and by 1532 the name America was permanently affixed to the newly discovered continents.

It must be noted that the name “America” referred to only the South American continent, as the North and Central America had not yet been “discovered” by European explorers. In any case, the name came to be used synonymous with the New World, i.e. name of the western hemisphere of the world.

German humanist scholars and cosmographers Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüll’s 1507 book “Cosmographiae Introductio” (Introduction to Cosmography) included the Latin translation of the Soderini letter, a letter Vespucci wrote Soderini. Prior to the coming out of “Cosmographiae Introductio” (Introduction to Cosmography), Martin Waldseemuller had reprinted the “Quattuor Americi navigationes” (“Four Voyages of Amerigo”).

Distinguished consultant in the court of King Ferdinand of Spain

In 1508, he was appointed by the Crown of Castile to serve as the piloto mayor (master navigator) in the  Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) in Seville. Image: Statue of Vespucci outside the Uffizi in Florence, Italy

By 1505, Vespucci’s name had become known all across Europe, almost to the same reverence as fellow Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. Vespucci was invited by Ferdinand of Spain to serve the monarch on matters of navigation and exploration.

He was employed by Spain to facilitate exploration into the New World by prepare explorers for the voyages. Based in Seville, the very respected navigator and explorer was also tasked to working out western passage from Europe to India. Vespucci even got paid for his work, receiving an annual salary of about 50,000 maravedis and other allowances and benefits.

He also worked as the chief navigator for the Casa de Contratación  de las Indias (Commercial House for the Indies), an agency founded in 1503 in Sevilla to not only train pilots and ship masters but to also issue out licenses to ship captains and navigators. Vespucci stayed in that position until his death in 1512.

Read More: 10 Greatest Explorers of All Time

Other notable accomplishments of Amerigo Vespucci

Amerigo Vespucci accomplishments

In addition to being one of the most famous pioneers of Atlantic exploration, Amerigo Vespucci’s discoveries helped expand our knowledge of the New World. The following are other notable accomplishments of the Florence-born explorer and navigator:

• In April 1505, Amerigo Vespucci was made a citizen of Castile and León under the auspices of a royal proclamation.
• From 1505 to 1512, he worked for the Spanish crown, prepared official map of newly found lands and routes. Those maps were meant for organizing and coordinating expeditions to the New World.

More Amerigo Vespucci facts

He grew up in middle-income family in Santa Lucia d’Ognissanti. | Image: – Portrait engraving of Vespucci by Crispijn van de Passe, which titles him discoverer and conqueror of Brazilian land

Here are 10 other notable facts about the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci:

• It is widely held that Amerigo Vespucci was born on March 9, 1451. However, there have been some claims that put his birth year in 1454.
• While working in Seville as a business agent for the Medici family, he married a Spanish woman named Maria Cerezo. In Amerigo’s will, he describes her as the daughter of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba.
• The meaning of his name Vespucci translates into “Home Ruler”.
• Amerigo Vespucci was the third son of Nostagio Vespucci, a notary worker in Florence, Italy, and Lisa di Giovanni Mini.
• He was named after his grandfather Amerigo Vespucci, who was an important member of the Florentine government (the Signoria ).
• Amerigo Vespucci received his early education from his uncle Giorgio Antonio, a member of the Order of Preachers (also known as the Dominacan friar) in the monastery of San Marco. Giorgio was a renowned humanist scholar in Florence. Amerigo had the opportunity to learn a great deal of things from Giorgio, including Latin, rhetoric, and philosophy.
• His uncle also introduced him to works of classical Greek astronomers and geographers such as Strabo (c. 64 BC- c. 24 AD) and Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100-170 AD). Amerigo also derived a bit of influence from the works of Italian mathematician and cosmographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1398-1482).
• While working for the Medici family, he purchased a very expensive map drawn by Gabriel de Vallseca, a renowned cartographer.
• He embarked upon at least two expeditions to the New World; the first (1499-1500) was on behalf of Spain, while the second (1501-1502) was for his Portuguese employers.
• His critics accused him of taking credit for other people’s accomplishments. In some cases, it’s been said that other scholars erroneously appropriated works and discoveries of other explorers to him.

Bibliography

Ann Fitzpatrick Alper,  Forgotten Voyager: The Story of Amerigo Vespucci (Minneapolis: Lerner Publishing Group, 1991)

Edwards, Charles Lester; Vespucci, Amerigo (2009).  Amerigo Vespucci . Viartis

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe (2007).  Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America . New York: Random House

Formisano, Luciano (1992).  Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America . New York: Marsilio

Lynn Hoogenboom,  Amerigo Vespucci: A Primary Source Biography (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2006)

Mundus Novus: Letter to Lorenzo Pietro Di Medici, by Amerigo Vespucci; translation by George Tyler Northrup, Princeton University Press; 1916.

M.H.Davidson (1997)  Columbus Then and Now, a life re-examined. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press , p. 417)

Ray, Kurt (2004).  Amerigo Vespucci: Italian Explorer of the Americas . New York: The Rosen Publishing Group

Schulz, Norbert; Vespucci, Amerigo (2007).  Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus (mit Zweittexten) . MMO-Verlag

Vigneras, Louis-André (1976).  The Discovery of South America and the Andalusian Voyages . Chicago: University of Chicago Press

The Cosmographer Who Unknowingly Gave His Name to the Americas, by Mistake. Accessed on Nov 2, 2021

Tags: Amerigo Vespucci Florence-Italy Italian explorers The New World

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Amerigo Vespucci Timeline of Discoveries and Accomplishments

Published: Aug 9, 2023 · Modified: Oct 19, 2023 by Russell Yost · This post may contain affiliate links ·

Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian merchant and explorer who completed four voyages to the Americas between 1497 and 1504. He was the first European to recognize that these lands were not part of Asia, but a new continent.

His letters describing his voyages helped to popularize the idea of the Americas as a new world, and his name was eventually given to the entire Western Hemisphere.

Vespucci was born in Florence, Italy, in 1454. He studied astronomy and navigation at the University of Florence and then worked as a merchant for the Medici family.

Early Life (1451 - 1478)

Early career (1482 - 1495), voyages and later years (1497 - 1512).

In 1497, he was hired by the King of Spain to participate in an expedition to the Americas. Vespucci's first voyage took him to the coast of South America, where he explored the coastline and made contact with the native people. He returned to Spain in 1499.

Vespucci made three more voyages to the Americas, in 1501-1502, 1503-1504, and 1505-1506.

On these voyages, he explored more of the coast of South America and also visited the Caribbean islands.

1451:  Amerigo Vespucci into the Vespucci family was a well-known surname that lived and was successful in Florence. He was born at the beginning of the Renaissance, and his family were good friends with the Medici family, who held most of the power within the city. There is a good chance that Amerigo Vespucci would have personally known Leonardo da Vinci during his teenage years.

1465 - 1470s:  His older brothers were sent to the University of Pisa for their education, but Amerigo was tutored by his uncle. His uncle happened to be one of the most respected and educated humanist thinkers of that time and taught his nephew all the liberal arts, including astronomy and Latin. This education was key to his development in the upcoming century.

1478: His cousin led a Florentine diplomatic mission to Paris and invited Amerigo Vespucci to join him. Amerigo's role is not clear, but it was likely as an attache or private secretary. Along the way, they had business in Bologna, Milan, and Lyon. Their objective in Paris was to obtain French support for Florence's war with Naples. The mission did not yield many results, but no doubt was an excellent experience for Vespucci.

1482:  After his father died, he went to work for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici, head of the junior branch of the Medici family. Although Amerigo was twelve years older, they had been schoolmates under the tutelage of his uncle. Amerigo served first as a household manager and then gradually took on increasing responsibilities, handling various business dealings for the family both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, he continued to show an interest in geography, at one point buying an expensive map made by the master cartographer Gabriel de Vallseca.

1488: Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco became dissatisfied with his Seville business agent, Tomasso Capponi. He dispatched Vespucci to investigate the situation and provide an assessment of a suggested replacement, Florentine merchant Gianotto Berardi. 

1492:  Christopher Columbus discovered the New World and sent shockwaves throughout Europe. With a new route being opened, it created more opportunities. At this time, Vespucci had moved from Florence to Seville, where he worked with Gianotto Berardi. It was through Berardi that he became familiar with Christopher Columbus.

1495:  Berardi signed a contract with the crown to send 12 resupply ships to Hispaniola but then died unexpectedly in December without completing the terms of the contract. Vespucci was the executor of Berardi's will, collecting debts and paying outstanding obligations for the firm. Afterward, he was left owing 140,000 maravedis . He continued to provision ships bound for the West Indies, but his opportunities were diminishing; Columbus's expeditions were not providing the hoped-for profits, and his patron, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco Medici, was using other Florentine agents for his business in Seville.

During this time, he married.

1497 - 1500:  According to Amerigo Vespucci, he took two voyages under the Spanish Crown to the New World. These voyages have been disputed as fiction by historians, but they cannot be proven false. 

1501 - 1504:  Vespucci would sail under the Portuguese Crown during the next two voyages. While the first voyage is not disputed, the second voyage is disputed by some historians. Again, these accusations cannot be proven false, and there are primary sources of Vespucci's that state he was there.

Vespucci realized that he was not in Asia and had instead discovered a new continent on August 17, 1501. He was sailing along the coast of Brazil on his first voyage to the Americas when he noticed that the land did not match the descriptions of Asia that he had read. The rivers were larger, the mountains were higher, and the people were different. Vespucci also noticed that the land extended much further south than Asia was thought to extend.

1505 - 1506: He returned to Seville and served the Spanish Crown. The Spanish monarchy did not mind that he had served Portugal and wanted to know information that could possibly show them a new way to Asia. 

1508: He was named chief pilot for the  Casa de Contratación  or House of Commerce, which served as a central trading house for Spain's overseas possessions. He was paid an annual salary of 50,000  maravedis with an extra 25,000 for expenses. In his new role, Vespucci was responsible for ensuring that ships' pilots were adequately trained and licensed before sailing to the New World.

1512:  He died and left his modest estate to his wife and his books to his nephew. His fame would come later, and two continents and a country have his name.

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Amerigo vespucci world tour 2023-2025.

• Publication date: April 09 2024

The History

The Amerigo Vespucci, the historic and iconic training ship of the Italian Navy, has embarked on a 20-month tour of the world, commencing on 1 July 2023.

With a return to port scheduled for 26 February 2025, the ship will travel approximately 40,000 miles .

Commissioned in May 1930 and launched in February 1931, the ship entered service in July of the same year as a training ship for the Livorno Naval Academy, with the aim of training future officers for the Royal Navy. Today she is considered a true floating jewel, a witness to ninety years of Italian history. The ship’s motto is “Not he who begins, but he who perseveres”.

The Nave Vespucci is commonly known as the ‘Floating Embassy’ of Italy. Its main functions are to train Officer Cadets and provide distinctive sailing experiences. Moreover, it provides opportunities for collaboration and highlights Italy’s image, displaying the excellence of Italian-made and symbolic products. The ship embodies Italy’s historical tradition and culture to the world.

The ship is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the famous explorer born into a rich and noble family in Florence in 1454. Vespucci met Christopher Columbus in Spain and was inspired by his voyages of discovery. Although the exact number of voyages made by Vespucci is unknown, recent studies suggest that he made four.

The first two voyages were conducted on behalf of the Spanish Crown, commencing in 1497 with the exploration of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast of the United States. The voyages then proceeded southwards towards the mouth of Rio de las Amazonas and Cape Sao Agostinho.

The last two voyages were commissioned by the King of Portugal and followed a route that included the Cape Verde Islands, the Atlantic coasts of South America (from Guiana to Patagonia), and Rio de Janeiro Bay in 1502.

The Ship in figures

It is worth noting that the ship’s length at the waterline is 82 metres, but it reaches 101 metres between the extreme stern and the end of the bowsprit. Additionally, the hull’s maximum width is 15.5 metres, which increases to 21 metres when considering the size of the boats protruding from the broadside, and to 28 metres when considering the ends of the longest yardarm, the mainmast trevo. Finally, the maximum draught is 7.3 metres.

The ship features three vertical masts, each carrying five spars, and a total sail area of approximately 2635 square metres, consisting of 24 sails.

The sails are manoeuvred by cables of different diameters, totalling approximately 36 km.

The hull is of the three main deck type. At the bow of the ship, there is a gilded bronze figurehead representing Amerigo Vespucci. The ship is further distinguished by its prow friezes and stern arabesque, which are made of wood covered in pure gold leaf. The vessel’s design has been described as elegant and majestic, which has earned it the nickname ‘Queen of the Seas’.

The crew is made up of 264 military personnel, including 15 officers, 30 non-commissioned officers, 34 sergeants, and 185 sub-commissioned officers and joint chiefs. They are divided into six departments: Operations, Marine, Detail/Arms, Naval/Electrical, Administrative/Logistics, and Health Services.

The Instruction Campaign sees the participation of around 400 individuals, including 100 cadets per year and support staff from the Naval Academy.

For further details regarding the boat and its history, please refer to: https://www.marina.difesa.it/noi-siamo-la-marina/mezzi/forze-navali/Pagine/Vespucci_ENG.aspx

Tour 2023-2025

The presence of Nave Vespucci in more than 30 ports across 27 countries will promote Italian values and production excellence on five continents, strengthening the competitiveness of the Country System at a global level.

Already an ambassador for UNESCO and UNICEF, Nave Vespucci will also help develop and consolidate academic and university collaborations during its world tour, particularly in the field of scientific research and the protection of the marine system, while promoting the environmental objectives of World Oceans Day.

The 2023-’25 round-the-world voyage of the “Queen of the Seas” is scheduled as follows:

• Departure from Genoa on 1 July 2023. Planned stops in various international ports such as the Principality of Monaco, Marseille in France, Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, Dakar in Senegal, and Praia in the Cape Verde Islands.
• After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, it will arrive in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic between 6 and 28 August.
• It will continue its journey southwards with stops in Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, where it remained until 1 April 2024.
• After passing through the Strait of Magellan (or Cape Horn) , the ship will visit various ports along the Pacific coast , including Punta Arenas in Chile, Callao in Peru, and Guayaquil in Ecuador.
• The voyage will continue with a series of stops in North America, including the cities of Los Angeles and Honolulu in the United States.
• For the first time, the Vespucci will cross the Pacific Ocean to visit Tokyo in Japan and Manila in the Philippines,
• She will then dock in Darwin in the Northern Territory (Australia) for three days from 4 to 7 October .
• This will be followed by stops in Indonesia, Singapore, India, Pakistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Egypt, and Cyprus.
• The return to La Spezia, home port, is scheduled for 11 February 2025

More info on the Vespucci tour (in IT)   https://www.marina.difesa.it/cosa-facciamo/Pagine/Il_giro_del_mondo_nave_Vespucci.aspx

The Spirit of Stella and the Wheels on Waves Project

Lo Spirito di Stella is a remarkable catamaran that provides an opportunity for people with disabilities to enjoy the sea. The boat has embarked on a round-the-world voyage from Genoa, alongside Nave Vespucci, and will make several stops in Australia, including Sydney and Brisbane, before reuniting with Nave Vespucci at the Port of Darwin. The Wheels on Waves project is dedicated primarily to veterans of all Armed Forces who became disabled during the course of their service. It enables people with disabilities and their companions to experience the sea and sailing free of charge and without any barriers.

For further details on Wheels on Waves, please visit Wheels On Waves 2023-2025 | Come on board and sail with us!

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