Amerigo Vespucci

Amerigo Vespucci was a Florentine merchant, navigator and cartographer associated with voyages to the Atlantic coast of South America around the turn of the sixteenth century. His experience in Iberian commercial networks and exploration connected practical navigation with the circulation of reports, maps and geographical ideas.

Accounts published under Vespucci’s name argued that the lands reached across the Atlantic formed a separate continent rather than the eastern edge of Asia. The cartographer Martin Waldseemüller used the name America in 1507 in reference to those reports. David Boyle’s Toward the Setting Sun sets Vespucci’s career alongside the competing ventures of Columbus and Cabot.