9th March: Amerigo Vespucci

Amerigo Vespucci, the explorer for whom America was named, was born on this date in 1454. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence, Italy and was educated by his uncle, who was a Dominican friar.
2. He started his working life as a merchant, working for the Medici family. It was his employers who sent him to Spain - as an undercover agent in their Spanish office, to spy on the managers there who were arousing suspicion.
3. Later, he became a provision contractor for Indies expeditions, securing supplies for the ships making the trip. In this role, he procured supplies for at least one of Columbus's trips; so would have met the explorer and heard all about his voyages. This is no doubt what gave him the travel bug!
4. When he was in his 40s, his business was not doing so well, and so he was happy to take up the invitation of king Manuel I of Portugal, to go on a voyage to the New World as an observer. He certainly went twice, possibly as many as four times, and wrote letters describing what he observed there, including the customs and habits of the people living there.
5. Before these voyages, it was assumed by explorers that North and South America were one continent. It was one of Vespucci's voyages that sailed to the tip of South America and it was he who figured out that they were actually two distinct continents.
6. King Ferdinand created a new, very highly paid, position especially for Vespucci - Chief Navigator of Spain. Part of his job was to set up a school of navigation to standardise the methods used by sea captains, as well as planning navigation for voyages.
7. He developed a method of determining longitude, which was rudimentary, but fairly accurate for the time.
8. He was married, to a woman named Maria Cerezo. Not a lot is known about her, except that after Amerigo died, his successor was ordered by the king to pay her a lifetime pension of ten thousand marvedis a year.
9. He didn't ask to have the new continents named after him - it was a map maker called Martin Waldseemüller who gave them the name. Amerigo himself possibly never even knew that he'd been honoured in this way.
10. When writing his letters, Vespucci often used the Latin form of his name, Americus Vespucius. America is the feminine form of the name, since, as Waldseemüller noted, "both Europa and Asia got their names from women".