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I once jokingly referred to Americans as “United Statesians” and a few people got their knickers in a royal twist. News flash: The entire motherfucking Western hemisphere is the Americas. You don’t own the name, much as you might like to think you do. Any-fucking-way, the name “Americas” was named after some slave-trading douchecanoe named Amerigo Vespucci.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 7, 1501--
Born in Florence in what is now Italy in 1451, explorer and navigator Amerigo made two actual voyages to the Americas, and two alleged ones. Let’s talk about the ones we know for sure happened. From 1499 to 1500 he joined a Spanish mission to the northeast coast of South America, near present-day Surinam. Amerigo was a financial backer for the trip. They went south along the coast for a ways, still looking for the Indian Ocean because they hadn’t figured out this was a fucking continent yet. Then they gave up, went back north, grabbed 232 Native Americans from the Bahamas and said you belong to us now, welcome to a life of slavery, and took them back to Spain.
A year later Portugal offered him a spot as pilot on their mission to what would come to be known as Brazil. On that trip he referred to the Americas as a “New World,” writing, “On 7 August, 1501, we dropped our anchor off the shores of that new land … we determined that the new land was not an island but a continent.” But they didn’t name that continent right away. Although they did name a city that now has seven million people living in it. They found a bay and misnamed it as a river and since it was January 1, 1502, they called the placed Rio de Janeiro, and four centuries later someone built a huge Jesus statue there.
Amerigo Vespucci went back to Spain and wrote shit and that shit got spread around and people started drawing maps of this new world that was actually an old world for a lot of other people who were about to have several bad centuries. Then in 1507 a couple of German cartographers wrote a book titled Introduction to Cosmography that included a map of the world. In it they wrote that Amerigo was a “sagacious genius” and that we should totally call that place he visited at least twice and maybe four times but we’re not sure, the “Land of Amerigo” but let’s just shorten it to America, k?
A shitload of copies of the map were published and the name stuck. Of course, the Columbus supporters were fucking pissed but hey at least he got country named after him.
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