Early Years

Born on 9 March,1454, to Stagio and Elizabetta Vespucci in the city-state of Florence Italy, Amerigo was the third of four brothers.

During his childhood, the very studious Amerigo read and collected maps and knowledge. He could hardly have expected that one day two continents would be named after him.

His first job was working under a banker for the Medici family. His heart was not into commerce and he studied and dreamed of doing something else.

During the years 1478 to 1480 he represented the city state of Florence in the court of King Louis XI of Paris.
Three years after that his father died and he returned to working in commerce. In the course of his profession he travelled to Spain. He was well into his forties when he made this trip; and it was in Spain that he was offered and accepted his first position on a ship, that of a navigator³ .

It was seven years after King Ferdinand had sent another explorer Christopher Columbus out searching for a westerly route to the Indies when Vespucci made his first voyage. Three ships set out from Cadiz, Spain in the spring of 1497 bearing Vespucci as the navigator for this group. This was the most northerly of his voyages travelling up North America and then returning to Spain in October.

In 1499 he set a more southerly course and followed the Brazilian coast past the Amazon river. Once again failing to find an opening to the Pacific he returned to Spain in poor health.
The next year he went to work for Portugal and sailed out of Lisbon. This time he went down to the Plata River and returned via the South Georgia Islands.

Among the textbooks that Amerigo read as a young man was probably a Greek text by Ptolemy. For many centuries this was the definitive encyclopaedia on geographical and astronomical knowledge. Another work of literature was one by Dante Alighieri who wrote in his epic poem 'The Divine Comedy'

I turned to the right hand, and gave heed to the other pole and saw four stars never seen save by the first people.

In 1503 as Captain of his own expedition he gave up on the southerly route and looked for a way west along the Southern shore of the Caribbean. Reaching the Atrato river he traveled far up river gathering pearls and gold to take back to Europe. This was shortly after another explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa had taken a similar route. It would however be 1513 before Balboa would ever see the Pacific Ocean and 1520 before Magellan would sail on it.

Columbus never realized that there was another ocean (the Pacific) between the land he found and Asia. Amerigo never saw the Pacific either, but by celestial mechanics and the application of mathematics he computed a circumference of the world within 50 miles(80 km) of its real size; and deduced that what he was looking at was a hitherto unknown continent. He used the word 'the new world' to describe it while others just said 'terra incognito'⁴.

Amerigo wrote and published accounts of the lives and culture of the natives in this new world, and his accounts caught the imagination of a German mapmaker, Martin Waldseemüller, who accepted Amerigo's judgement that this was new territory and labelled it 'America'! ⁵ Soon other map-makers followed suit, and in 1538 (26 years after the death of Amerigo Vespucci) a world map was published by
Gerardus Mercator
including two continents that he labelled 'North and South America'.

In 1505 Amerigo married Maria Carezo but had no children. Amerigo was fifty-four at that time. Then a few years before his death he opened a school to teach seamanship and in 1508 was given the title 'Piloto Mayor de Espana' which translates as Pilot Major and signified that he was the head of the Spanish Navy.

Amerigo Vespucci died on 22 February, 1512, of malaria, and was buried in Seville, Spain.