Bumbling Explorers

[I’ve adapted this commentary from delanceyplace.com, which itself was quoting Made in America, a book by Bill Bryson. It's kinda long, but I repurpose it here because I find it enjoyable and hope you will too.]

Various European explorers of the New World were woefully inept. Columbus never found Asia and really didn’t know where he was during the eight years he spent bouncing around the islands of the Caribbean. Giovanni da Verrazano was eaten by natives. Balboa, after discovering the Pacific, was betrayed by his colleague Francisco Pizarro and executed on trumped-up charges. Pizarro in his turn was murdered by rivals. Hernando de Soto marched an army pointlessly all over what is now the southeastern United States for four years until he caught a fever and died. 

The "Columbus Map," ca. 1490.

Scores of other adventurers went looking for wealth, eternal youth, or a shortcut to the Orient and mostly found misery. Their fruitless searches live on, sometimes unexpectedly, in the names on the landscape. For example, California commemorates a Queen Califia who was supposed to be unspeakably rich but unfortunately did not exist. Amazon denotes a mythical tribe of one-breasted women. Brazil and the Antilles recall fabulous, but also fictitious, islands.

English explorers fared little better. Sir Humphrey Gilbert perished in a storm off the Azores in 1583 after trying unsuccessfully to found a colony on Newfoundland. His half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh, attempting to establish a settlement in Virginia, lost a fortune and eventually his head in the effort. Henry Hudson pushed his crew a little too far while looking for a northwest passage and found himself put to sea in a little boat, never to be seen again. 

The endearingly hopeless Martin Frobisher explored the Arctic region of Canada, found what he thought was gold, and carried fifteen hundred tons of it home on a dangerously overloaded boat only to be informed that it was worthless iron pyrites. Undaunted, he returned to Canada, found another source of gold, carted thirteen hundred tons of it back, and was informed by a presumably weary royal assayer that it too was worthless. After that, we hear no more of Martin Frobisher.

It is interesting to speculate what these daring adventurers would think if they knew how whimsically we commemorate them today. Would Verrazano think being eaten by cannibals a reasonable price to pay for having his name attached to a toll bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island? De Soto found brief fame in the name of an automobile; Frobisher in a distant icy bay; and Raleigh in a city in North Carolina, a brand of cigarettes, and a make of bicycle. 

By comparison, Columbus fared pretty well – a university, two state capitals, a country in South America, a province in Canada, and high schools almost without number, among a great deal else that bears his name. 

But in terms of linguistic immortality no one got more mileage from less activity than a shadowy Italian-born businessman named Amerigo Vespucci. How two continents came to be named in his honor involves an unlikely measure of coincidence and error. Vespucci did make some voyages to the New World, but always as a passenger or lowly officer. He was not, by any means, an accomplished seaman. Yet in 1504-1505, letters of unknown authorship began circulating in Florence, collected under the title Nuovo Mundo, that stated that Vespucci 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 Waldseemuller was working on a revised edition of the works 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 Vespucci's exploits, named the continent in his honor. 

It wasn't quite as simple as that, however. At first he translated Amerigo into the Latin Americus, then transformed that into its feminine form, America, on the ground that Asia and Europe were feminine. He also considered, and rejected, the name Amerige. Even so it wasn't until forty years later that people began to refer to the New World as America, and then they meant only South America.

Source: Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, pp. 7-9, by Bill Bryson. Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (1994).