The map that named America

Martin Waldseemüller's large world map was the first known to use the name America, honoring Amerigo Vespucci. Waldseemüller later dropped the name, but it stuck.

Context

The map was produced in 1507 in Saint-Dié, in the Vosges region of France, by a scholarly circle that included the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller and the writer Matthias Ringmann. Printed from 12 woodblocks, it forms a wall map more than 2 meters wide, and it was published alongside a small book, Cosmographiae Introductio.

The name America appears on the southern part of the New World, taken from the Latin form of Amerigo Vespucci's first name, because the authors credited Vespucci's accounts with showing these lands were a separate continent rather than part of Asia. Waldseemüller later dropped the name from a 1513 map, but other mapmakers had already adopted it.

About a thousand copies are thought to have been printed, yet only one is known to survive, found in a castle in Wolfegg, Germany, in 1901. The Library of Congress bought it in 2001 and put it on display. It also shows a Pacific Ocean separating the Americas from Asia, before Europeans had seen the Pacific from the Americas.

Maps like this show how knowledge of the Atlantic world spread through print in the early sixteenth century.