40 Fun Facts About Amerigo Vespucci

The Vespucci family's coat of arms featured which insects, a play on what their surname means in Italian?

Wasps were a visual pun: Vespucci means little wasps in Italian, so the family put the insects on its shield.

Which country is said to owe its name to stilt houses that reminded Amerigo Vespucci of an Italian canal city?

Venezuela means Little Venice in the usual telling, after lakeside villages raised on stilts, though one crewman wrote that the name came from a local people instead.

Which Brazilian city is named for a bay that an expedition carrying Amerigo Vespucci reached on New Year's Day 1502?

Rio de Janeiro means January River, the name the sailors gave Guanabara Bay to mark the date they first saw it.

Which American institution paid ten million dollars for the only surviving copy of the 1507 map that named America?

The Library of Congress bought the map from a German princely family, in whose castle library it had lain unnoticed until 1901, and shows it in a specially built microclimate case.

Simonetta Vespucci, wife of Amerigo's cousin and famed for her beauty, is said to have modelled for which painter?

Botticelli lived beside the Vespucci and is buried in their parish church, but historians now doubt the romantic tale that Simonetta posed for his paintings.

Which explorer, whose fleets Vespucci's firm helped supply, never clearly gave up believing he had reached the Far East?

Christopher Columbus died in 1506, a year before a mapmaker printed another man's first name across the lands he had reached.

In 1960 the Italian Navy's tall ship Amerigo Vespucci ferried which famous symbol from Greece to Sicily?

The Olympic torch sailed aboard her from Piraeus to Syracuse on its way to the Rome Games, almost three decades after the three-masted ship was launched.

In which Italian city-state, a centre of Renaissance art and learning, was the explorer Amerigo Vespucci born?

Florence is also where he skipped university to be tutored by his uncle, a friar counted among the most celebrated humanist scholars in the city.

Which lasting nickname for the Americas was popularised by a 1503 letter published under Amerigo Vespucci's name?

The New World translates the letter's Latin title, Mundus Novus, and the pamphlet proved such a hit that twelve editions were printed within a year.

Which American essayist mocked Amerigo Vespucci in 1856 as a 'pickle dealer' who got half the globe named after him?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the jibe when Vespucci's reputation was at its lowest; opinion began to turn soon afterwards, when a Brazilian historian defended his letters.

Which powerful banking family employed Amerigo Vespucci as a business agent long before he ever went to sea?

Medici business first sent him to Spain: a junior branch of the family, which he had served since his father died in 1482, dispatched him to check on its agent there.

After first crossing the Atlantic for Spain, Amerigo Vespucci explored the coast of Brazil in 1501 for which kingdom?

Portugal hired him after one of its India fleets stumbled on the land by accident; King Manuel I wanted to know how much of it lay on his side of a treaty line.

In which Spanish port city, later the hub of trade with the Americas, did Amerigo Vespucci settle for good by 1492?

Seville drew him in on business for his Italian employers, and he stayed to provision ships for the Indies and marry a Spanish woman who handled his business while he was at sea.

Which German cartographer honoured Amerigo Vespucci by printing the name America on a world map in 1507?

Martin Waldseemüller later had second thoughts and left the name off his 1513 map, but by then other mapmakers were already copying it.

Juan de la Cosa, chief navigator on Amerigo Vespucci's 1499 voyage, had earlier owned which famous flagship of 1492?

The Santa María ran aground and was lost on that first voyage, and its owner went on to draw the oldest known European map showing the Americas.

Amerigo Vespucci's ships of 1499 are thought to have passed which giant river, its fresh water pouring far out to sea?

The Amazon was one of two huge river mouths the ships crossed, yet Vespucci still assumed he was coasting Asia and looking for a passage to the Indian Ocean.

Which queen, backer of the famous 1492 voyage, founded the Spanish House of Trade where Amerigo Vespucci later worked?

Isabella of Castile set up the agency in 1503 to control traffic with the Indies; five years later it gave Vespucci the job of training its navigators.

Which German chancellor formally handed the 1507 map that named America over to the United States in 2007?

Angela Merkel made the gesture in the map's 500th year, presenting it as thanks for American help in rebuilding postwar Germany.

Which kind of US Navy ship signalled in 1962 that Italy's tall ship Amerigo Vespucci was the world's most beautiful?

An aircraft carrier, USS Independence, flashed the compliment by signal lamp in the Mediterranean after first asking the sailing ship to identify herself.

Saint-Dié, the small town where scholars drew up the 1507 map that named America, lies in which present-day country?

France now holds the town, but in 1507 it belonged to the Duchy of Lorraine, where a small academy of humanist scholars had gathered to study geography.

The 1507 map that named America drew an ocean on its far side six years before which Spaniard first sighted it?

Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed Panama to the Pacific in 1513, so how the map's makers knew to put water between America and Asia remains a puzzle.

In 1501 Amerigo Vespucci's outbound fleet met which navigator returning from India, who had found Brazil a year before?

Pedro Álvares Cabral's ships were met by chance at anchor, and the letter Vespucci wrote from that stop passes on details of the India voyage.

Which office did Spain create for Amerigo Vespucci in 1508, putting him in charge of training ocean-going crews?

Pilot major made him the examiner who licensed navigators for the Indies, a post he held for the last four years of his life.

Amerigo Vespucci shared his exact name with which relative, a chancellor of his home city's government for 36 years?

His grandfather was the first Amerigo Vespucci, and the family's standing with the city's rulers gave the boy powerful connections but no great fortune.

Amerigo Vespucci's 1499 Spanish expedition set out to investigate reports of which treasure along a newly found coast?

Pearls had been reported on that shore by an earlier voyage, and Vespucci and his backers put up the money for two of the four ships sent after them.

A rival theory says America was named for Richard Amerike, a merchant and sheriff of which English port?

Bristol was the port John Cabot sailed from in 1497; a local antiquarian floated the Amerike theory in 1908, pointing to early maps that have since been lost.

Which Flemish mapmaker first spread the name America across both the northern and southern continents in 1538?

Gerardus Mercator stretched a label that had first sat on the southern landmass alone, and after his influential map the name was secure on charts.

The 1507 map that named America pairs a portrait of Amerigo Vespucci with one of which ancient geographer?

Ptolemy stood for the old picture of the globe and Vespucci for the new: the map's title credits the tradition of one and the voyages of the other.

Before sailing home in 1500, Amerigo Vespucci's ships stopped for repairs at Spain's colony on which Caribbean island?

Hispaniola was already familiar to him on paper: back in Spain, the firm he worked with had contracted to send twelve supply ships to the same colony.

Amerigo Vespucci's 1501 voyage was sent to find where Brazil lay relative to which treaty's dividing line?

The Treaty of Tordesillas had split the unexplored globe along an Atlantic meridian in 1494, and any land east of that line could be claimed by Vespucci's new employer.

Which friar, famed as a defender of Indigenous peoples, branded Amerigo Vespucci a liar who stole a rival's credit?

Bartolomé de las Casas suspected that Vespucci had dressed up a later voyage as an earlier one in order to claim he reached the mainland first.

Which Prussian naturalist, namesake of an ocean current, judged Amerigo Vespucci's claimed 1497 voyage impossible?

Alexander von Humboldt accepted two of the later voyages but questioned whether Vespucci ever grasped that he had found a new continent.

Which painter, later Michelangelo's teacher, made a Vespucci family chapel fresco reputed to show Amerigo as a child?

Domenico Ghirlandaio and his brother painted the family sheltering beneath the Virgin's cloak, and tradition picks out one young face as the future navigator.

As Spain's chief navigator, Amerigo Vespucci was charged with compiling the Padrón Real, which was what?

A secret master map was kept so that every chart issued to Spanish ships came from one official template, updated with what returning navigators reported.

Amerigo Vespucci's will asked for burial in his wife's family tomb wearing the habit of which religious order?

Franciscans were a notable choice, since the uncle who educated him was a Dominican friar; the same will left his books and instruments to a nephew.

One fringe theory traces the name America to the Amerrisque Mountains, a range in which Central American country?

Nicaragua's central range was put forward in 1875 by Jules Marcou, who argued that the local name reached Europe by word of mouth from returning sailors.

On the way home in 1500, Amerigo Vespucci's ships raided which island group and carried off 232 Lucayan captives?

The Bahamas raid was a slaving expedition, and within about twenty years of such raids the Lucayan people had vanished from the islands altogether.

Amerigo Vespucci's yearly salary as Spain's chief navigator was 50,000 of which old Spanish money unit?

Maravedís take their name from the Almoravid dinar, and the crown added 25,000 more each year to cover his expenses.

Piero Soderini, addressee of a famous letter in Vespucci's name, employed which political writer as second chancellor?

Niccolò Machiavelli served the republic that Soderini led for life from 1502, and the letter addressed to its leader is the only one claiming four Vespucci voyages.

On his 1513 map, the cartographer who had named America for Amerigo Vespucci replaced that name with which Latin label?

Terra Incognita means unknown land, and the text beside it credited the discovery to a different explorer; the retreat came a year after Vespucci died.