![]() Vespucci was finally convinced when he proceeded on his mapping expedition through 1501–02, covering the huge stretch of coast of eastern Brazil. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() In fact, a famous chance meeting between two different expeditions had occurred at the watering stop of "Bezeguiche" (the Bay of Dakar, Senegal)-Vespucci's 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 Álvares Cabral, returning home from India. Īccording to Mundus Novus, Vespucci realized that he was in a "New World" on 17 August 1501 as he arrived in Brazil and compared the nature and people of the place with what Portuguese sailors told him about Asia. 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, as asserted by Columbus, but rather an entirely different continent, a "New World". The term "New World" ( Mundus Novus) was coined by Amerigo Vespucci, in a letter written to his friend and former patron Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de' Medici in the Spring of 1503, and published (in Latin) in 1503–04 under the title Mundus Novus. Mundus Novus Īllegory of the New World: Amerigo Vespucci awakens the sleeping America In another letter (to the nurse of Prince John, written 1500), Columbus refers to having reached a "new heavens and world" ("nuevo cielo é mundo") and that he had placed "another world" ("otro mundo") under the dominion of the Kings of Spain. Columbus proposes that the South American landmass is not a "fourth" continent, but rather the terrestrial paradise of Biblical tradition, a land allegedly known (but undiscovered) by Christendom. In Columbus's 1499 letter to the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, reporting the results of his third voyage, he relates how the massive waters of South America's Orinoco delta rushing into the Gulf of Paria implied that a previously unknown continent must lie behind it. A year later (20 October 1494), Peter Martyr again refers to the marvels of the New Globe ("Novo Orbe") and the " Western hemisphere" ("ab occidente hemisphero"). ![]() Only a few weeks after Columbus's return from his first voyage, Martyr wrote letters referring to Columbus's discovered lands as the "western antipodes" ("antipodibus occiduis", letter of ), the "new hemisphere of the earth" ("novo terrarum hemisphaerio", 13 September 1493), and in a letter dated 1 November 1493, refers to Columbus as the "discoverer of the new globe" ("Colonus ille novi orbis repertor"). ![]() The Italian-born Spanish chronicler Peter Martyr d'Anghiera doubted Christopher Columbus's claims to have reached East Asia (" the Indies"), and consequently came up with alternative names to refer to them. This was merely a literary flourish, not a suggestion of a new "fourth" part of the world Cadamosto was aware that sub-Saharan Africa was part of the African continent. The Venetian explorer Alvise Cadamosto used the term un altro mondo" ("another world") to refer to sub-Saharan Africa, which he explored in 14 on behalf of the Portuguese. The Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci is usually credited for coming up with the term "New World" ( Mundus Novus) for the Americas in his 1503 letter, giving it its popular cachet, although similar terms had nonetheless been used and applied before him. History of the New World "Historia antipodum oder newe Welt". ![]()
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