End Christopher Columbus Day

Most everyone has heard the rhyme; “Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in America in 1492” but the truth is he never really landed nor found America. In fact he thought he had landed in South America, thinking it was an island he claimed it and christened it Isla Santa for Spain. Truth be told he never was even close to being the first European to discover America, the oldest person we have documented was Leif Eriksson who landed there as early as 500 years before Columbus, Eriksson and a band of Vikings that originated in Europe and settled in America for a few awhile until leaving eventually. After Christopher Columbus opened the door to European exploration an Italian voyager names Amerigo Vespucci sailed for Portugal around 1501-1502. Vespucci showed that the land formerly known as New World was not a part of Asia or Brazil but rather a new continent. In 1507a humanist, Martin Waldseemüler reprinted the “Quattuor Americi navigationes” (“Four Voyages of Amerigo”). And he suggested that the newly discovered world be named “ab Americo Inventore… quasi Americi terram sive Americam” (“ From Amerigo the discoverer… as if it were the land of Americus or America”).The proposal is perpetuated in a large planisphere of Waldseemüller’s, in which the name America appears for the first time, although applied only to South America. The suggestion caught on; the extension of the name to North America, however, came later. On the upper part of the map where the hemisphere compromising the Old World appears the picture of Ptolemy; on the part where the New World hemisphere is Vespucci