Today
marks the 500-year anniversary of the name America. Where did the name come
from, and what does it tell us about ourselves today?
Martin Waldseemuller (c.1470 - c.1522), a German mapmaker working
near Strasbourg in what is now France, invented the name America. In his
famous world map of 1507, titled Universalis cosmographia, he was the first to portray the New World as
a separate continent, and the first to give it the name America.
We don't know on
what day in 1507 the map itself was printed. But on April 25, 1507 Waldseemuller published a pamphlet which explained how he
came up with the name America,
and so this date is generally taken as the actual birth date of the name.
Waldseemuller named America after
the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512),
using the Latin version of his name, Americus Vespucius.
The three known continents, Europe, Asia and Africa,
all had feminine endings in Latin. So Waldseemuller
bestowed a suitable femininity on the new continent, and the name America was
born.
Waldseemuller's map was path-breaking in
other ways. He was also the first to portray a separate Western ocean - what we
now call the Pacific. The coastal outlines of Africa and America are
depicted with such astonishing accuracy, that scholars still cannot explain
where he got all his information. A pleasant air of mystery still surrounds
this magnificent map.
Waldseemuller knew that Columbus had discovered the New World.
But Vespucci had published the most detailed information available. Perhaps
more importantly, Vespucci had recognized the New World
as a separate continent, so it seemed natural to name it for him.
The word America appears only once on the map, over what
is now Brazil
- a fact which has caused some confusion. But Waldseemuller
described the entire New World as one
continent, and clearly meant to name all of it.
In a later map, Waldseemuller appeared to recant, labeling the new
continent simply terra incognita, or unknown land. Perhaps he belatedly
recognized the primacy of Columbus
as an explorer. Or maybe he had second thoughts about naming a continent after
a person. But the name America
stuck: it was beyond recall.
America is a beautiful name, and
we should thank our good German for his gift. It is easier to pronounce than,
say, The United States of Vespuccia would have been.
And we will skim over the fact that in a later map, Waldseemuller
labeled all of what is now North America as "Cuba,"
and re-attached it to the Asian continent - neither of which would have greatly
endeared him to subsequent citizens of the United States.
America, like our citizenry, can
claim a broad family tree. Here was a German, working in what is now France,
using the name of an Italian explorer, who in turn was named after the
Hungarian, St. Americus, for territories first discovered for the West by
Vikings (some say, perhaps even the Irish), and then claimed by Portuguese and
Spaniards, who themselves had a fair amount of Islamic and Jewish ancestry, in
a land which Columbus first thought to be part of Japan, and was in fact inhabited
by Native Americans, who were mistakenly identified with the India, on a
landmass that - in geological terms - was once part of Africa. That just about
covers the globe.
It was long
thought that no original copy of Waldseemuller's
famous map had survived. In 1901, however, the Jesuit priest, Josef Fischer,
discovered the only known copy in the library of a German castle. This
wonderful map has been called "America's birth certificate."
It was purchased by the Library of Congress in 2003 for the tidy sum of $10
million, and can now be viewed (in facsimile) in the Jefferson Building
on Capitol Hill. The original, currently being restored, is scheduled to go on
display in December of 2007.
Looking at this
beautiful map a few weeks ago, it struck me that the name America was
invented for all Americans, native and immigrant, North and South.
So,
Happy Birthday, Americans.
Paul Drexler,
who lives in Wayland, is writing a book about the German-speaking world.