He was just an ordinary sailor but in the end he has not one but two continents named after him!
Some of the most amazing inspiring stories when you are growing up seem so unreal! Then finally you find out that it is unreal!
This story though would be as shocking as it comes!
In the novel Bill Bryson’s “Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States”; every page is a story worth telling!
One story was specially interesting!
So the person in context did make some voyages to the New World (authorities differ on whether it was three or four), but always as a passenger or lowly officer. He was not, by any means, an accomplished seaman. Yet in 1504-5, there began circulating in Florence letters of unknown authorship, collected under the title Nuovo Mundo (New World), which stated that he had not only been captain of these voyages but had discovered the New World!
The mistake would probably have gone no further except that an instructor at a small college in eastern France named Martin Waldseemüller was working on a revised edition of Ptolemy and decided to freshen it up with a new map of the world!
In the course of his research he came upon the Florentine letters and, impressed with their spurious account of the sailor’s exploits, named the continent in his honour.
Ok now enough of suspense! The name of the sailor was Amerigo Vespucci!
The continents named after him of course was America!
Of course it was first translated into the Latin Ame-ricus and then transformed that into its feminine form, America, on the ground that Asia and Europe were feminine. They also considered the name Amerige by the way!
Of course the fact of the matter remains that two whole continents are named after an obscure sailor who may have probably not even set foot on them!
That’s may make you smile! It’s needed nowadays…catch a P. V. Jagadish Kumar movie maybe!
Prayers and wishes…
Shubh Ratri…
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