New World - Name Origin

Name Origin

The term was first coined by the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, in a letter written to his patron Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de' Medici in the Spring of 1503, and published (in Latin) in 1503-04 under the title Mundus Novus. Vespucci's letter contains arguably the first explicit articulation in print of the hypothesis that the lands discovered by European navigators to the west were not the edges of Asia, but rather an entirely different continent, a "New World".

Vespucci probably came to this realization in June of 1502, during a famous chance meeting between two different expeditions at the watering stop of "Bezeguiche" (the Bay of Dakar, Senegal) - his own outgoing expedition, on its way to chart the coast of newly-discovered Brazil, and the vanguard ships of the Second Portuguese India armada of Pedro Alvares Cabral, returning home from India. Having already visited the Americas in prior years, Vespucci probably found it difficult to reconcile what he had already seen in the West Indies, with what the returning sailors told him of the East Indies. Vespucci wrote a preliminary letter to Lorenzo, while anchored at Bezeguiche, which he sent back with the Portuguese fleet - at this point only expressing a certain puzzlement about his conversations. Vespucci was finally persuaded when he proceeded on his mapping expedition through 1501-02, covering the huge stretch of coast of eastern Brazil. After returning from Brazil, in the Spring of 1503, Amerigo Vespucci composed the Mundus Novus letter in Lisbon to Lorenzo in Florence, with its famous opening paragraph:

In passed days I wrote very fully to you of my return from new countries, which have been found and explored with the ships, at the cost and by the command of this Most Serene King of Portugal; and it is lawful to call it a new world, because none of these countries were known to our ancestors and all who hear about them they will be entirely new. For the opinion of the ancients was, that the greater part of the world beyond the equinoctial line to the south was not land, but only sea, which they have called the Atlantic; and even if they have affirmed that any continent is there, they have given many reasons for denying it is inhabited. But this opinion is false, and entirely opposed to the truth. My last voyage has proved it, for I have found a continent in that southern part; full of animals and more populous than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa, and even more temperate and pleasant than any other region known to us.

Vespucci's letter was a publishing sensation in Europe, immediately (and repeatedly) reprinted in several other countries.

The Vespucci passage above applied the "New World" label to merely the continental landmass of South America. At the time, most of the continent of North America was not yet discovered, and Vespucci's comments do not eliminate the possibility that the islands of the Antilles discovered earlier by Christopher Columbus might still be the eastern edges of Asia, as Columbus continued to insist down to his dying day. A critical step in the transition was the conference of navigators (Junta de Navegantes) assembled by the Spanish monarchs at Toro in 1505, and Burgos in 1508, to digest all existing information about the Indies, come to an agreement on what had really been discovered, and set out the future goals of Spanish exploration. Amerigo Vespucci attended both conferences, and seems to have had an outsized influence on them - Vespucci ended up being appointed the first piloto mayor, the chief of navigation of Spain at Burgos. . Although proceedings of the Toro conference are missing, it is almost certain that Vespucci articulated his recent "New World" thesis to his fellow navigators there. It was during these conferences when Spanish officials seem to have finally accepted that the Antilles and the known stretch of Central America were definitely not the Indies they had originally sought, and Columbus had insisted they were, and set out the new goal for Spanish explorers: to find a strait through the American landmass which would permit them to sail to East Asia proper.