It is a distinct possibility that had it not been for the graphic tales of violence and sex from the New World around 500 years ago the continent that is now known as America would have taken another label.

Amerigo Vespucci’s westward expeditions between 1497 and 1502 made landfall in what is now Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil. Accounts of these expeditions, with stories of lustful natives having cannibalistic tendencies and life spans of 150 years, caught the public imagination. Present day scholars dispute the authenticity of many of Vespucci’s first hand accounts and letters; in fact the dates and number of Vespucci’s expeditions remains unsettled to this day.

However, 500 years ago Vespucci was held in relatively high esteem, particularly by a German geographer named Martin Waldseemüller. It was Waldseemüller who in 1505 enamored by Vespucci’s colorful observations published a new survey of world geography and named the newly discovered southern continent “America”, after Vespucci. In the survey Waldseemüller wrote: “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, Amerige, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women”.

For those interested in the etymology of the name “America” read on. Amerigo Vespucci is the modern Italianate form of the medieval latinized name Emericus (or Americus) Vespucius. In, assigning the name “America”, Waldseemüller took the feminine form of Americus. The German equivalent to Emericus is Heinrich, which in English, is, of course, Henry.

[div class=attrib]From the Independent:[end-div]

[Amerigo Vespucci] was not a natural sailor. Writing to Lorenzo de’Medici, he moaned about “the risks of shipwreck, the innumerable physical deprivations, the permanent anguish that afflicted our spirits… we were prey to such terrible fear that we gave up every hope of surviving.” But when everything was as bad as it could get, “In the midst of this terrible tempest… it pleased the Almighty to show us the continent, new earth and an unknown world.”

These were the words that, once set in type, galvanised Europe. Vespucci knew the geographical works of Ptolemy and had spent years steeped in maps and geographical speculation. For him the coast of modern Venezuela and Brazil where his expedition landed had nothing in common with the zones described by explorers of the Orient. Instead this was something far more fascinating – an unimagined world.

“Surely,” he wrote, “if the terrestrial paradise be in any part of this earth, I esteem that it is not far from these parts.” In his description, this New World is made up of extremes. On the one hand, the people he encounters are living in a dream-like state of bliss: with no metals except gold, no clothes, no signs of age, few diseases, no government, no religion, no trade. In a land rich in animals and plants, colours and fragrances, free from the stain of civilisation, “they live 150 years and rarely fall ill”.

But turn the coin and he was in a world of devils. “They eat one another, the victor [eats] the vanquished,” he wrote. “I know a man… who was reputed to have eaten more than 300 human bodies…” The women are intensely desirable: “none… among them who had a flabby breast,” but they are also monsters and witches: “… Being very lustful, [they] cause the private parts of their husbands to swell up to such a huge size that they appear deformed and disgusting… in consequence of this many lose their organs which break through lack of attention, and they remain eunuchs… When [the women] had the opportunity of copulating with Christians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled… themselves.”

Vespucci’s sensational description inspired an early etching of the Florentine’s first encounter with an American: the explorer and the naked, voluptuous and very pale woman lock eyes; the woman is in the act of clambering off a hammock and moving in his direction. Meanwhile, on a nearby hillock, a woman is roasting the lower half of a human body over a fire.

The wild and fantastic nature of Vespucci’s descriptions raises the question of how reliable any of his observations are – but then vast doubt surrounds almost everything about his adventures. We don’t know how many voyages he undertook; his authorship of some of the accounts is questionable; and it is not even universally accepted that he identified South America for what it was, a new continent.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of biography.com.[end-div]