Word: vespucci
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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While rubbernecking in Manhattan in his billowy red robes of office and a three-cornered black hat, the Lord Mayor of Bristol, England, Fitzroy Chamberlain, dropped an unlikely footnote to history. Historians, said he, are hopelessly unjust in attributing the name America to Italian Mapmaker and Merchant Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512). The eponym in truth: a fine English lad named Richard Amerycke. In the Bristol view of history, Amerycke, a customs collector, saw to it that Italian Explorer John Cabot, who discovered Cape Breton Island in 1497 and claimed it for the British crown, received a pension from King Henry...
...that had kept men from trying the dread Atlantic crossing. But he died believing that he had reached Asia, never accepted the fact that the New World was really another continental land mass. The first man to name it the New World was the Florentine navigator and businessman Amerigo Vespucci; at least, according to Author Arciniegas, he also reached the mainland before Columbus.* Arciniegas has given him one of his few book-length biographies five centuries after his birth...
...Name Stuck. The plodding research that has gone into Amerigo may help clear its hero's name, though it does not answer the question at the head of the publisher's blurb: "What sort of man was Amerigo Vespucci?" So little is known for sure about him that it could easily fit into a tightly written essay. Author Arciniegas pads out his book with heavily-written filler about Florence and Spain, never comes close to presenting a talking, walking Amerigo...