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THE NAMING OF AMERICA: FRAGMENTS
WE'VE SHORED AGAINST OURSELVES
BY JONATHAN COHEN
Click here to see entire map.
The name America (applied to present-day Brazil)
appeared for what is believed the first time on
Martin Waldseemuller's 1507 world map, known as the
Baptismal Certificate of the New World, and also
America's Birth Certificate. More
_______________________________
Am rica, no invoco tu nombre en vano
[America, I don't call your name without hope]
Pablo Neruda, Canto General
AMERICA, we learn as schoolchildren, was named in honor of
Amerigo Vespucci, for his discovery of the mainland of the
New World. We tend not to question this lesson about the
naming of America. By the time we are adults it lingers
vaguely in most of us, along with images of wave-tossed
caravels and forests peopled with naked cannibals. Not
surprisingly, the notion that America was named for
Vespucci has long been universally accepted, so much so
that a lineal descendant, America Vespucci, came to New
Orleans in 1839 and asked for a land grant "in recognition
of her name and parentage." Since the late 19th century,
however, conflicting ideas about the truth of the
derivation have been set forth with profound cultural and
political implications. To question the origin of
America's name is to question the nature of not only our
history lessons but our very identity as Americans.
Traditional history lessons about the discovery of America
also raise questions about the meaning of discovery
itself. It is now universally recognized that neither
Vespucci nor Columbus "discovered" America. They were of
course preceded by the pre-historic Asian forebears of
Native Americans, who migrated across some ice-bridge in
the Bering Straits or over the stepping stones of the
Aleutian Islands. A black African discovery of America, it
has been argued, took place around 3,000 years ago, and
influenced the development of Mayan, Aztec, and Inca
civilizations. The records of Scandinavian expeditions to
America are found in sagas their historic cores
encrusted with additions made by every storyteller who had
ever repeated them. The Icelandic Saga of Eric the Red,
the settler of Greenland, which tells how Eric's son Leif
came to Vinland, was first written down in the second half
of the 13th century, 250 years after Leif found a western
land full of "wheatfields and grapevines," the image
resonating now with the remains of an 11th-century Norse
settlement in Newfoundland, excavated in the 1960s, that
forms the only undisputed evidence of the first European
presence in the New World. From this Norse history emerged
a fanciful theory in 1930 that the origin of "America" is
Scandinavian: Amt meaning "district" plus Eric, to form
Amteric, or the Land of (Leif) Eric.
Other Norsemen went out to the land Leif had discovered;
in fact, contemporary advocates of the Norse connection
claim that from around the beginning of the 11th century,
North Atlantic sailors called this place Ommerike
(oh-MEH-ric-eh), an Old Norse word meaning "farthest
outland." (This theory is currently being promoted by U.S.
white supremacists of the so-called Christian Party, who
are intent on preserving the nation's Nordic character,
and who argue that the Norse Ommerike derives from the
Gothic Amalric, which, according to them, means "Kingdom
of Heaven.") But most non-Scandinavians were ignorant of
these sailors' bold exploits until the 17th century, and
what they actually found was not seriously discussed by
European geographers until the 18th century. Further,
other discoveries of America have been credited to the
Irish who had sailed to a land they called Iargalon, the
land beyond the sunset, and to the Phoenicians who
purportedly came here before the Norse. The 1497 voyage by
John Cabot to the Labrador coast of Newfoundland
constitutes yet another discovery of the American
mainland, which led to an early 20th-century account of
the naming of America, recently revived, that claims the
New World was named after an Englishman (Welshman,
actually) called Richard Amerike.
From Map of the Discoveries of Columbus, Christopher
Columbus/Carolus Verardus, 1493.[s] And yet, despite the
issue of who discovered America, we are still confronted
with the awesome fact that it was the voyages of Columbus,
and not earlier ones, that changed the course of world
history. Indeed, as Tzvetan Todorov, author of The
Conquest of America (1984; tr. Richard Howard), has
argued, "The conquest of America heralds and establishes
our present identity; even if every date that permits us
to separate any two periods is arbitrary, none is more
suitable, in order to mark the beginning of the modern
era, than the year 1492, the year Columbus crosses the
Atlantic Ocean." Columbus clearly made a monumental
discovery in showing Europe how to sail across the
Atlantic; Vespucci's great contribution was to tell Europe
that the land Columbus had found was not Asia but a New
World (and that a western route to Asia involved yet
another ocean beyond it). The naming of America, then,
becomes essential to a full understanding of our history
and cultural values ourselves especially when
considered in terms of the range of theories about the
origin of the name.
The Maya Connection
The most explosive, haunting, almost credible etymology
the so-called Amerrique theory which was first advanced in
1875 reappeared in the late 1970s in an essay by Guyanan
novelist Jan Carew, titled "The Caribbean Writer and
Exile" (Journal of Black Studies). Here Carew focuses on
the identity struggle of Caribbeans who are "subject to
successive waves of cultural alienation from birth a
process that has its origins embedded in a mosaic of
cultural fragments Amerindian, African, European,
Asian." He adds that "the European fragment is brought
into sharper focus than the others, but it remains a
fragment." It is in his discussion of this European
fragment that he turns to the early historical accounts
written by "European colonizers, about their apocalyptic
intrusion into the Amerindian domains" histories which,
he argues, are largely fictions "characterized, with few
exceptions, by romantic evasions of truth and voluminous
omissions."
Carew moves from the "fictions" of Columbus to those of
Vespucci with these striking words: "Alberigo Vespucci,
and I deliberately use his authentic Christian name, a
Florentine dilettante and rascal, corrected Columbus's
error [thinking he had found the Orient] Vespucci, having
sailed to the American mainland declared that what
Columbus had indeed stumbled on was a New World." Carew
then alludes to Vespucci's famous letters about his
voyages (more later about these controversial letters),
which caused a great stir throughout Europe when they were
published in the early 1500s. In them Vespucci "invented a
colonizer's America, and the reality that is ours never
recovered from this literary assault and the distortions
he inflicted upon it" because "the fiction of a 'virgin
land' inhabited by savages, at once a racist one and a
contradiction, remains with us to this day." But Carew, in
developing his own fiction which derives largely from a
fanciful 19th-century treatise, goes on to say: "Amerigo [
sic] was undoubtedly a Florentine dilettante [and] an
extraordinarily clever one. Why would he otherwise have
changed his Christian name after his voyages to the
Americas?"
Carew is resurrecting the ideas of Jules Marcou, a
prominent French geologist who while studying North
America argued, as did other 19th-century writers, that
the name America was brought back to Europe from the New
World; and that Vespucci had changed his name to reflect
the name of his discovery. Specifically, Marcou introduced
the name of an Indian tribe and of a district in Nicaragua
called Amerrique, and asserted that this district rich
in gold had been visited by both Columbus and Vespucci,
who then made this name known in Europe (see Marcou's map
). For both explorers the words Amerrique and gold became
synonymous. Subsequently, according to Marcou's account,
Vespucci changed his Christian name from Alberico to
Amerigo. Carew cites Marcou to back his claim that "in the
archives of Toledo, a letter from Vespucci to the Cardinal
dated December 9, 1508, is signed Amerrigo with the double
'r' as in the Indian Amerrique and between 1508 and 1512,
the year in which Vespucci died, at least two other
signatures with the Christian name Amerrigo were
recorded." (See Marcou's 1875 article in the Atlantic
Monthly and his more elaborate work published subsequently
in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution
[1890].)
Kukulc n, Mayan god of the wind. [s]Like Marcou, Carew
wants us to believe that America was not named after
Vespucci, but vice versa; that Vespucci had, so to speak,
re-named himself after his discovery, gilding his given
name by modifying it to reflect the significance of his
discovery. For Carew, however, the "truth" he found in his
reading of history becomes a source of rage: "Robbing
peoples and countries of their indigenous names was one of
the cruel games that colonizers played with the colonized
. To rob people or countries of their names is to set in
motion a psychic disturbance which can in turn create a
permanent crisis of identity. As if to underline this
fact, the theft of an important place-name from the
heartland of the Americas and the claim that it was a
dilettante's Christian name robs the original name of its
elemental meaning."
And what of this elemental meaning? To define it Carew
echoes Marcou, who quotes from his correspondence with
Augustus Le Plongeon. An imaginative anthropologist
studying the Mayan culture in Yucatan, Le Plongeon had
written to the French scholar: "The name AMERICA or
AMERRIQUE in the Mayan language means, a country of
perpetually strong wind, or the Land of the Wind, and
sometimes the suffix '-ique' and '-ika' can mean not only
wind or air but also a spirit that breathes, life itself."
All this leads Carew to conclude that "we must, therefore,
reclaim the name of our America and give it once again its
primordial meaning, land of the wind, the fountainhead of
life and movement." His assertions concerning the name and
its origin demand closer scrutiny, for in his passion to
dispel myths he has created new ones.
Vespucci's Good Name
First of all, Vespucci's name must be cleared. He has been
wrongfully portrayed as a crafty opportunist ever since
the mid-16th century when Bartholomew de Las Casas accused
him of being a liar and a thief who stole the glory that
belonged to Columbus. "The new continent," insisted Las
Casas, "should have been called Columba and not as it is
unjustly called, America." In his epoch-making History of
the Indies, Las Casas demeans Vespucci and his
achievement, slandering his name by describing what he (a
friend of Columbus and his family) considered "the long
premeditated plan of Vespucci to have the world
acknowledge him as the discoverer of the largest part of
the Indies." Vespucci's unfounded bad reputation persisted
here throughout the 19th century. One of the climaxes of
vilification was attained by Emerson, who comments in
English Traits (1856): "Strange that broad America must
wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle
dealer at Seville, who went out, in 1499, a subaltern with
Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boat-swain's mate
in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying
world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with
his own dishonest name." Vespucci was not the man
described by Las Casas and Emerson, nor was he simply "an
unimportant Florentine merchant," as he is described in
the 1992 edition of Compton's Encyclopedia "published [by
a Division of Encyclopedia Britannica] with the editorial
advice of the faculties of the University of Chicago."
[vespucci][s]Vespucci was born in 1454 in Florence, where
he was baptized, according to the official record,
"Amerigho" -- not, as Carew asserts, Alberigo. The use of
the form Amerigho for Amerigo is an instance of the
orthographic anarchy that existed in the spelling of
proper names. The name Amerigo derives from an old Gothic
name, Amalrich. In all its forms found in Europe (Greek
"Aimulos," Latin "Aemelius") the underlying meaning was
that of work. Amalrich, which literally meant work ruler,
or designator of tasks, might be freely translated as
master workman. Old German forms of the name were
Amalrich, Almerich, Emmerich; the Spanish form was
Almerigo; in England it was Almerick, or Merica in old
families in Yorkshire. It appeared in feminine forms in
Amelia and Emily; its masculine forms were Amery, Emeric,
and Emery. But as Charlotte Mary Yonge wrote in her
History of Christian Names (1884), it was "the Italian
form, Amerigo, which was destined to the most noted use
which should hold fast that most fortuitous title, whence
thousands of miles, and millions of men, bear the
appellation of the forgotten forefather of a tribe of the
Goths Amalrich, the work ruler; a curiously appropriate
title for the new world of labor and of progress."
Some Hungarian scholars believe Vespucci was named after
Saint Emeric (c. 1000-1031), son of the first king of
Hungary. He was known in Latin as Sanctus Americus, after
being canonized for his pious life and purity. As a
further reflection of national pride, a theory native to
Hungary holds that the European explorers of the New
World, or their priests, named it after this popular
saint, in the old tradition of bestowing place names in
honor of saints. However, no proof of this etymology
exists. Concerning Vespucci, he actually was named after
his grandfather, as indicated in the baptism register of
his church in Florence: "Amerigho et Matteo di ser
Nastagio [his father] di ser Amerigho [his grandfather]
Vespucci." His grandfather's burial stone there is
inscribed with the elder's name as Amerigo Vespuccio.
As was the custom of the Florentine nobility, Vespucci
received an education that featured special instruction in
the sciences connected with navigation natural
philosophy, astronomy, and cosmography in which he
excelled. Around 1490 he was sent to Spain by his
employers, the famous Italian family of Medici, to join
their business in fitting out ships. Vespucci was probably
in Seville in 1492 when Columbus was preparing for his
first historic voyage, as well as in 1493 when Columbus
returned. Soon after, Vespucci was involved in fitting out
the fleet for Columbus's second voyage. The two men
eventually became friends; Columbus later wrote that he
trusted Vespucci and held him in high esteem.
The period during which Vespucci made his own voyages
falls between 1497(?) and 1504(?). At the beginning of
1505 he was summoned to the court of Spain for a private
consultation, and, as a man of experience, was engaged to
work for the famous Casa de Contratacion de las Indias
(Commercial House for the West Indies), which had been
founded two years before in Seville. In 1508 the house
appointed him piloto mayor (pilot major, or chief
navigator), a post of great responsibility, which included
the examination of the pilots' and ships' masters'
licenses for voyages. He also had to prepare the official
map of newly discovered lands and of the routes to them
(for the royal survey), interpreting and coordinating all
data that the captains were obliged to furnish. Vespucci,
who obtained Spanish citizenship, held this position until
his death in Seville in 1512. In the face of the spurious
charges that he was an ignorant usurper of the merits of
others, the fact that Spain entrusted him, a foreigner,
with the office of pilot major certainly bolsters his
defense.
During the first half of the 20th century, scholars
discovered further evidence that clears away the cloud of
misunderstanding and ignorance by which Vespucci has long
been obscured. Frederick J. Pohl's biography, Amerigo
Vespucci, Pilot Major (1966), and Germ n Arciniegas's
Amerigo and the New World (1955; tr. Harriet de On s) are
among the best efforts that dispel the shadows to which he
was relegated by those who maligned his fame. Nonetheless,
both biographers disagree about the authenticity of his
two published letters, key documents in a dramatic
controversy: Arciniegas accepts them as genuine, whereas
Pohl rejects them as forgeries. Their arguments both
muster convincing evidence, suggesting an irreconcilable
debate. But the question concerning the authenticity of
these historic letters remains fundamental to the
evaluation of Vespucci's achievement.
Two series of documents on his voyages are extant. The
first or traditional series consists of the widely
published letters, dated 1504, purportedly written by him.
Addressed to his patron, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de'
Medici, who had sent Vespucci to Spain to do business for
him there, Mundus Novus (New World) the title alone
revolutionizing the European conception of the cosmos
was translated from the Italian into Latin, and originally
printed in Vienna; the other letter, addressed to the
gonfaloniere (chief magistrate) of Florence, Piero
Soderini, was a more elaborate work. The second series
consists of three private letters addressed to the Medici.
In the first series of documents, four voyages by Vespucci
are described; in the second, only two. Until the 1930s
the documents of the first series were considered from the
point of view of the order of the four voyages. According
to the conflicting theory to which Pohl and other modern
scholars subscribe, these documents should be regarded as
the result of skillful, unauthorized manipulations by
entrepreneurs, and the sole authentic papers would be the
private letters, so that the verified voyages would be
reduced to two. Most important, if the first series of
documents are indeed forgeries, the "first" of the four
voyages (dated 1497) never took place, and thus Vespucci
could not be given priority of one year over Columbus on
reaching the American mainland, nor could he be considered
the first to explore the coastline of Central America,
Mexico, and the southeastern coast of the United States.
From Juan Vespucci's 1526 world map. [s] The voyage
completed by Vespucci between May 1499 and June 1500 as
navigator of an expedition of four ships sent from Spain
under the command of Alonso de Hojeda is certainly
authentic. This is the second expedition of the
traditional series. Since Vespucci took part as navigator,
he certainly cannot have been inexperienced; however, it
seems unlikely that he had made a previous voyage, though
this matter remains unresolved. In the voyage of 1499
1500, Vespucci would seem to have left Hojeda after
reaching the coast of what is now Guyana (Carew's
homeland). Turning south, he is believed to have
discovered the mouth of the Amazon River and explored the
coast of present-day Brazil. On the way back, he reached
Trinidad, sighting en route the mouth of the Orinoco
River, and then made for Haiti. Vespucci thought he had
sailed along the coast of the extreme easterly peninsula
of Asia, where Ptolemy, the 2nd-century Greek geographer,
believed the market of Cattigara to be; so he looked for
the tip of this peninsula, calling it Cape Cattigara. He
supposed that the ships, once past this point, emerged
into the seas of southern Asia. As soon as he was back in
Spain, he equipped a fresh expedition with the aim of
reaching Asia. But the Spanish government did not welcome
his proposals, and at the end of 1500 Vespucci went into
the service of Portugal.
Under Portuguese auspices he completed a second
expedition, which set sail from Lisbon on May 31, 1501.
After a halt at the Cape Verde Islands, the expedition
traveled southwestward, reached the coast of Brazil, and
certainly sailed as far south as the R o de la Plata,
which Vespucci was the first European to discover. In all
likelihood the ships took a quick run still farther south,
along the coast of Patagonia to the Golfo de San Juli n or
beyond. His ships returned by an unknown route, anchoring
at Lisbon on July 12, 1502. This voyage is of fundamental
importance in the history of geography in that Vespucci
himself became convinced that the lands he had explored
were not part of Asia but a New World. Unlike Columbus,
who, to his death, clung to the idea that he had found the
shores of Asia, Vespucci defined what had indeed been
found and for this he has been rightfully honored.
Naming the New World
Vespucci not only explored unknown regions but also
invented a system of computing exact longitude and arrived
at a figure computing the earth's equational circumference
only fifty miles short of the correct measurement. It was,
however, not his many solid accomplishments but an
apparent error made by a group of scholars living in St.
Die, near Strasbourg, France, in the mountains of
Lorraine, then part of Germany, that led America to be
named (ostensibly) after him; and this is largely why his
reputation has suffered. His published letters had fallen
into the hands of these German scholars, among whom was
the young cartographer Martin Waldseemuller. Inspired to
publish a new geography that would embrace the New World,
the group collectively authored a revision of Ptolemy,
which included a Latin translation of Vespucci's purported
letter to Soderini, as well as a new map of the world
drawn by Waldseemuller. In their resulting Cosmographiae
Introductio, printed on April 25, 1507, appear these
famous words (as translated from the original Latin; see
below) written most likely by one of the two poet-scholars
involved in the project: "But now these parts [Europe,
Asia, and Africa, the three continents of the Ptolemaic
geography] have been extensively explored and a fourth
part has been discovered by Americus Vespuccius [a Latin
form of Vespucci's name], as will be seen in the appendix:
I do not see what right any one would have to object to
calling this part after Americus, who discovered it and
who is a man of intelligence, [and so to name it] Amerige,
that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both
Europa and Asia got their names from women" (see John W.
Hessler's quincentennial edition of the Cosmographiae
Introductio).
[cosmo]
The new geography included in its appendix Waldseemuller's
large, stunning map of the world, on which the New World
is boldly labeled AMERICA in the middle of present-day
Brazil. This map is the first known map, printed or
manuscript, to use the name America, and also the first to
depict clearly a separate western hemisphere, with the
Pacific as a separate ocean. The entire New World portion
of the map roughly represents South America, and when
later mapmakers added North America, they retained the
original name; in 1538, the great geographer Gerard
Mercator gave the name America to all of the Western
Hemisphere on his Mapamundi. Waldseemuller's 1507 map,
lost to scholars until 1901 when it was found in a German
castle, is now reckoned to be the first to show the name,
and the earliest record of its use. Moreover, the
discoverer of the map went so far as to dub it the
"Baptismal Certificate of the New World." Historians today
agree that Vespucci, who was completely unaware of the
project in Lorraine, had nothing to do with the so-called
baptism. He clearly never tried to have the New World
named after him or to belittle his friend Columbus.
Nonetheless, the name America spread throughout Europe and
quickly established itself through sheer force of usage.
The baptismal passage in the Cosmographiae Introductio has
commonly been read as argument, in which the author said
that he was naming the newly discovered continent in honor
of Vespucci and saw no reason for objections. But, as
etymologist Joy Rea has suggested, it could also be read
as explanation, in which he indicates that he has heard
the New World was called America, and the only explanation
lay in Vespucci's name. In ignoring the possible intention
of these words as explanation, most scholars have ignored
the simple fact that place names usually originate
informally in the spoken word and first circulate that
way, not in the printed word. Moreover, to read the
passage in the Cosmographiae Introductio as explanation
lends credence to the theory, argued by Carew, Marcou, and
others, that the early European explorers called the new
continent Amerrique or, perhaps, another name with a
similar pronunciation.
Even though the Latinization of Americus fits a pattern,
why did the cosmographers not employ Albericus (hence the
assumption that "Alberigo" was Vespucci's authentic
Christian name), the Latinization that had already been
used for Amerigo's name as the author of Mundus Novus?
Their substitution of Americus for the well-known
Latinization Albericus might mean that they wanted a
Latinization that would fit and explain the name America
which they had already heard applied to the New World. Why
did they ignore the common law in the naming of new lands:
the use of the last names of explorers and the first names
of royalty? Their ignoring it, Rea claims, further
supports the idea that they were trying to force an
explanation and that the only one they could think of was
a Latinization of Vespucci's first name.
Another Amerindian Root
[gold2][s] [gold1][s] Did America get its name through
oral tradition when those who had sailed with Columbus or
Vespucci circulated stories that gold was to be found in
the Amerrique Mountains of Nicaragua? According to Ricardo
Palma's Tradiciones Peruanas (Peruvian Traditions, 1949),
the ending of the word America indicates this origin: "The
ending ic (ica, ique, ico made Spanish) is found
frequently in the names of places, in the languages and
native dialects of Central America and even of the
Antilles. It seems to mean 'great, high, prominent' and is
applied to mountains and peaks in which there are no
volcanos." The Spanish Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada
(1907) gives Americ or Am rica as a mountainous region in
Nicaragua, adding that Columbus had landed on the coast of
Nicaragua directly east of these mountains. Columbus, who
met the Indians of this coast, presumably heard the name
Amerrique from them: he was looking for gold and the
Indians gave him some, telling him he could get more to
the west in the mountains there.
The coast at the foot of the Amerrique Mountains that
faces the Caribbean Sea is called the Mosquito Coast,
named for the Mosquito Indians, who live there still. The
Mosquitos are Caribs. It is almost certain that Columbus
first heard the name of the mountains pronounced by a
Carib. Amerrique, therefore, must derive from a Carib
word, possibly one of the Carib culture words not a word
in the Mayan language, which was not spoken in Nicaragua,
though it almost resembles in sound the Quiche Mayan iq'
amaq'el meaning perpetual wind. Further dispelling the
idea of a Maya connection to America, Robert M. Laughlin,
an eminent anthropologist with expertise in Mayan culture
and past curator of Mesoamerican Ethnology at the
Smithsonian Institution, points out that "r" is rarely in
the alphabets of Mayan languages.
The Caribs, traveling far from their Carib or Cariay
coast, could see the Amerriques in the distance, and these
mountains for them could have signified the mainland. The
Indians in the Caribbean did have a word for the mainland,
given in the Lexicograf a Antillana (Antillean Dictionary,
1931) as babeque and defined as the name that Columbus
understood the Indians to say when they were pointing to a
land beyond Haiti and Cuba. Las Casas believed for a while
that this must be Jamaica, but later decided it was the
name for the mainland. Other historians have considered it
the name the Caribs used for the mainland. Babeque,
different as it sounds from Amerrique, could possibly be a
variant of Amerrique. Very different spellings for the
same Carib word reflect variants that sound little like
each other; thus, the variants of the name Carib are
Canibe, Galibi, Caniba, Canibal, and Caliban.
The English Connection
[cabot] [s] Equally as amazing as the Amerrique theory,
the little-known theory that "America" derives from the
name of a Bristol-based Welshman, Richard Ameryk, emerged
early in the 20th century. It constitutes an incredible
Anglicization of the New World and would, for obvious
reasons, infuriate Carew. The theory was developed by
Alfred E. Hudd, a member of the Clifton Antiquarian Club,
which in 1910 published his work in its proceedings; the
paper, "Richard Ameryk and the Name America," had been
read to the group two years before. Hudd opens with a
reference to Bristol's 1897 celebration of the 400th
anniversary of the discovery of North America by John
Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), the Italian navigator and
explorer who had sailed for England, laying the groundwork
for the later British claim to Canada. For his achievement
Cabot received a handsome pension conferred upon him by
the King, from the hands of the Collectors of Customs of
the Port of Bristol. One of these officials, the senior of
the two, who was probably the person who handed over the
money to the explorer, was named Richard Ameryk (also
written Ap Meryke [Welsh] on one deed, and elsewhere
written Amerycke) who seems to have been a leading citizen
of Bristol at the time. Hudd claims that the name given to
the newly found land by the discoverer was "Amerika," in
honor of the official from whom he received his pension.
On his return to England the flamboyant Cabot, who dressed
in silk, was celebrated as "the Great Admiral." He had a
reputation for his extravagance. He purportedly gave one
of the islands he explored to a friend, another to his
barber, and also promised some Italian friars that they
could be bishops. Hudd reasons that if Cabot were so free
with his gifts to his poorer friends, it is easy to
understand his wish to show gratitude to the King's
official, and that he may well have done so by conferring
his name on "the new Isle" which, it was thought, lay off
the coast of China Cabot never realized that he had
found a continent.
To back his claim that the name America was known in
Bristol in the years just before 1500, and well before
Waldseemuller's map, Hudd presents the often quoted words
of a lost manuscript, one of the "Calendars" in which
local events were recorded: "This year [1497], on St. John
the Baptist's day [June 24th], the land of America was
found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe
called the 'Mathew,' the which said ship departed from the
port Bristowe the 2nd of May and came home again the 6th
August following." If Hudd's suggestion is correct, the
original manuscript documents the fact that the newly
discovered land was already called America in Bristol
before that name became known in Europe.
"Amerika," Hudd says, "seems much more like the name of
the Bristol Customs official, than that of the Italian
[Amerigo] and having been invented in Bristol, by Cabot,
and having been the only name for 'the new island' for
more than ten years after its discovery, the resemblance
of the name to that of Vespucci struck [the authors of the
Cosmosgraphiae Introductio] (to whom the English 'Richard
Ameryk' was quite unknown), and thus through an error of
his editor[s], to Vespucci was transferred the honour that
the discoverer of North America, John Cabot, had intended
to confer on the Bristolian 'Ameryk.'" Hudd fears that his
main evidence, the original manuscript of Bristol's
calendar, was lost in a fire and acknowledges that this
important piece of the puzzle is missing. However, even if
the name America were known in Bristol in 1497, Hudd has
taken a majestic leap to suggest Ameryk's name as its
origin. No proof exists to substantiate his claim that
Cabot actually honored the Welshman by naming America
after him. But if the name were indeed known in Bristol
then, how was that possible?
More recently, two Englishmen have championed the Amerike
theory. Peter MacDonald, author of Cabot & the Naming of
America: A Revelation (1997), asserts that Cabot named his
discovery after Amerike because "[Richard] Amerike sought
reward for his patronage by asking that any new-found
lands should be named after him." MacDonald doesn't stop
there. He also maintains that "since the flag of the
United States of America is based on the design of
Amerike's coat of arms, it is more than probable that its
origins lie with Amerike and not with George Washington,
whose family also bore arms of the Stars and Stripes" (see
BBC British History).
Like MacDonald's book, Rodney Broome's Terra Incognita:
The True Story of How America Got Its Name (2001) is a
good read, but ultimately lacks the hard evidence to
support the author s claim. He presents a compelling
inference at best. A longtime U.S. resident, Broome is
originally from Bristol. He summarizes his argument this
way in the Bristol Times: "Bristol merchants bought salt
cod in Iceland until the King of Denmark stopped the trade
in 1475. In 1479, four Bristol merchants received a royal
charter to find another source of fish and trade. Not
until 1960 did someone find bills of trading records
indicating that Richard Amerike was involved in this
business. Records show that in 1481, Amerike shipped a
load of salt (for salting fish) to these men in
Newfoundland and I believe the Bristol sailors named the
area after the Bristol merchant they worked for."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The current (fifth) edition of Webster's New World College
Dictionary admits the mystery that surrounds the origin of
the name America, saying it derives from "Americus
Vespucius but < ? Sp Amerrique, name of a mountain range
in Nicaragua, used by early explorers for the newly
discovered lands < ? AmInd." No definitive conclusions can
be reached. Too many claims are, for lack of hard
evidence, based on speculation. Theories about the true
origin of the name are ultimately historical fictions,
whose authors are inclined to impose their own political,
cultural, or national agendas on the name and its origin.
Yet behind these fictions lie compelling views of the New
World. Taken together, they form a multicultural vision of
its distinctive character. To hear Americus in the name;
to hear the Amerrique Mountains and their perpetual wind;
to hear the African in the Mayan iq' amaq'el; to hear the
Scandinavian Ommerike, as well as Amteric, and the
Algonquin Em-erika; to hear Saint Emeric of Hungary; to
hear Amalrich, the Gothic lord of the work ethic; to hear
Armorica, the ancient Gaulish name meaning place by the
sea; and to hear the English official, Amerike to hear
such echoes in the name of our hemisphere is to hear
ourselves.
[am-map-x]
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An early version of this essay appeared in The American
Voice (1988) and a section in Encounters (1991).
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