Vespuccia by Any Other Name

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Have you ever heard of the George Monument, or the Thomas Electric Company, or WP Corn Flakes? Of course not. We know them by the last name of those honored men: Washington, Edison, and Kellogg.

But such has not always been the case. Every school kid knows America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, the first name of the famous Italian explorer at the turn of the 16th century. But what few know is how our land came to be named “America” and not “Vespuccia.” Here is the “story behind the story.”

On his homeward journey from the New World in 1504, Vespucci sketched a map of the great continents he had explored with his name signed at the bottom. Upon returning to Italy he presented his map to his sponsor, Lorenzo de' Medici, the wealthy banker and political despot of Florence. Medici tossed Amerigo a few florins and took his map down into the bowels of the palace where he instructed his mapmaker to prepare a fine map of the new world from the Amerigo’s sketch, with the instruction to have it finished “by dawn of the morrow.”

The old man bent over his parchment, quill in hand and stone inkpot nearby. He worked into the night, long after the rest of the palace and its guard had gone to bed. He worked in the chilled damp cellar by the light of only two tallow lamps. Just before dawn he finished the map, and had only to inscribe the name of the New World continents, when one of the lamps flickered out and a shadow fell across half of Amerigo Vespucci’s name – the last half. The old man, his tired eyes now smarting from lack of sleep saw only the first name, “Amerigo,” and thus placed that name across his map of the New World.

Had that lamp not flickered out, of course, this great country would be known as Vespuccia. The World Series would be the National League versus the Vespuccia League. At the seventh inning stretch, the crowd would stand and sing, “Vespuccia, Vespuccia, God shed his grace on thee,” and if Kate Smith were there she would belt out, “God bless Vespuccia, land that I love.”

On the Fourth of July when the Boy Scouts come marching down the State Street, the old vets would stand up, lean on their canes, and raise their trembling arthritic old hands to their brow to salute Old Glory snapping in the breeze. By any other name, even Vespuccia, they would still proudly salute the land of the free and the home of the brave. -Bill Livingstone

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