The Life and Times of Amerigo Vespucci
Christopher Columbus may be famous for “discovering” the New World, but it’s named after me. There are many disputes about the explorations of individuals during this time period, so let me start from the beginning, as it seems a fitting place to do so. I left Cadiz in May 1497, on an expedition with four ships to the west. We passed many islands in the ocean, lots of them already settled. After many long days at sea, we came across a mass of land that we determined to be a continent. Once there, we saw many people along the coastline, dressed in nothing. Despite our calls of friendliness and peace, they stayed hidden. We decided to move on, because our ships were not in a very safe place anyway. After finding such a place to secure our ships, we went ashore, and found more people similar to those we had found before. After almost a full day of trying to convey to them that we were not here to harm them, they finally came out. We presented them with our gifts, and the next morning they presented us with gifts of theirs. During the following time we learned much about their lives and customs. For instance, they were very good athletes, both swimming and running. They had no organized religion, at least not one that was obvious to me. After being in the New World for a while, we set sail back to Spain, and we arrived in October of 1498.
This morning, I began reading the journal accounts of Christopher Columbus’s travels to the Americas. He also saw the same kinds of native peoples I did, I think. He also observed that they wore no clothes. He too noticed that they have a lack of organized religion, and he thought he could convert them to Christianity. However Mr. Columbus’s main mission was to find gold, and lots of it. You see, he thought he had found India, and from India he wanted this gold. He had not previously heard of the New World, and had no idea there were two large landmasses and another ocean between Europe and Asia.
I also came across Columbus’s letter to the King and Queen of Spain about his intentions of settling the New World and searching for gold. Even after his return, at this point in time, he still believed he discovered another route to India. He wants to build a small number of towns in his newly discovered lands, each one with a mayor. Among the buildings in his town, he wants a church to be built as a place for the colonists to worship, to help with the conversion of the Indians, which he named as though he had found India. He was a very thorough planner, I’ll give him that. He made all sorts of rules about what would be done depending on who found gold, when they found it, and what they were going to do with it. He also planned out how the gold would be kept, so that no one could steal it.
So you may be asking…if Columbus did indeed actually find the New World first, why is it named after me? Well, I was the first realize that the New World was not actually India, although I did not name it. Really. I’m not that self-centered. Actually, an amateur German geographer, who goes by the name Waldseemuller, named it. He deemed it appropriate since he thought I discovered it. I’m not going to argue with him. After all, why would I? I’ve got not losing anything. And it’s not totally a lie. Columbus may have seen it first, and wanted to settle it first, but I realized the significance of his discovery.
