Amerigo Vespucci Maps a New World

1501

Sailing under Portuguese colors along the Brazilian coast, the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci traced shoreline after shoreline and concluded, heretically, that Columbus had not reached Asia at all. His letters, printed and devoured across Europe, would soon give the new continents a name: America. His Mundus Novus letter argued convincingly that the southern continent was not Asia, fundamentally altering European geographical understanding.