Today's Lesson: How Not Admitting You Were Wrong Can Bite You

Why?  Why why why do I live in America?  Why?

Don't take me the wrong way, it's not that I don't like living in America, it's that I should be living in the United States of Columbia, shouldn't I?  Shouldn't all we Americans be called "Columbians?"  We've been taught for centuries that America was discovered by Christopher Columbus.  In 1492.  When he sailed the ocean blue. 

Never mind that that's not entirely true, he was the first mainstream European to reach what is now known to be the "Americas" and tell a lot of people about it.  Why didn't mapmakers start calling the new continents "Columbia?"  That's usually how it worked.  You land on it first, you tell people about it, they call it you.  So what gives with the continents in the Western Hemisphere?


Waldseemuller map detail.



Many people know that the continents are named after Amerigo Vespucci, who landed in South America five years after Columbus.  The first map to use the word "America" was made by Martin Waldseemuller in Germany, in 1507.  He'd seen some letters from Vespucci from a decade earlier, which described the many wonders of the new world.  The letters were forgeries, but Waldseemuller plopped in "America" on his map.  Fortunately, the forged letters only enhanced his reasoning and weren't the only reason.

See, Columbus had, until his dying breath, refused to accept (or perhaps admit) that he hadn't succeeded at his original goal - to find India and Asia.  Rather than admit he'd failed, and accept the pretty astouding accomplishment that he had in fact found entire new continents with amazing, flourishing new people and civilizations to destroy, he stubbornly claimed he had found India.  Thus, the long-used tag of "Indian" to our Native Americans.

It was Amerigo who, looking around South America five years after Christopher, said, "WTF...this is so not India.  I can't help but notice a severe lack of elephants.  This place is not only not India, it's not anywhere we've seen yet.  This is some new world."  Or something like that.  In Italian.  With many hand-gestures.

Since Columbus had stubbornly refused to admit he was wrong, and Vespucci had been the first to realize that the new continents were new continents, Waldseemuller named the place after Vespucci, and now, 500 years later, we live in the U.S.A instead of the U.S.C.  The only surviving print of the original Waldseemuller map was purchased from Germany in 2001 for ten million dollars, and is stored at the Library of Congress, where you can see...a copy of it.

 

Full 12-Panel Waldseemuller Map

If Columbus had been willing to admit he'd been incorrect about finding the Indies, everything might be different: we'd be using the Columbian Express Card, flying Columbian Airlines, singing "Columbia the Beautiful," and our grandparents would talk of how they dreamed of one day emigrating to the land of the free and living the Columbian dream.  But that's what you get for being stubborn and refusing to believe you could be wrong, even in the face of true hard facts: America.

That's why I live in America!  It's a nicer name anyway.

(c) 2010 Scott Teel.  All rights reserved n' don't you forget it.