Did Columb discover America by mistake? How did he come up with the idea to name

Question:As we learn as schoolchildren, America was named in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, for his discovery of the mainland of the New World, but it is Columb who gets the honor of 'discovering America'......

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: As we learn as schoolchildren, America was named in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, for his discovery of the mainland of the New World, but it is Columb who gets the honor of 'discovering America'......

America was named for Amerigo Vespucci.

Columbus wanted to find a shorter way to India so that there would be easier access to the spice trade instead of having to go around the Cape of Good Hope every time].

he was one of many that discovered America. He did not name it...it was named after Americus Vespuchi...(sorry unsure of spelling) he was as I remember a map maker that was used to map charts for ship captains. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India.. that was why he called the natives Indians.

As I was taught, he actually thought he had reached India because he was attempting to sail around the world to prove that it was round. Which is why native Americans are sometimes ignorantly referred to as Indians.

The name 'America' was supposedly dervied from Amerigo Vespucci who was an explorer during that time period.

Edit: Yes he was trying to find a shorter route to India like the others have mentioned, and he sailed in the opposite direction, believing the Earth to be round.

He discovered it by mistake. He knew the world was round and wanted to get to the Far East by leaving from Portugal and travelling west to reach the Far East. He did not envisage the possibility of a huge continent blocking his way though. When he got to America he actually thought it was India.

America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the person who realised that this continent Colombus had reached was in fact a new continent and not Asia.

The first Europeans to have reached America were in reality the Vikings who travelled to the Northern regions.

I think this question is not as easy to answer as it may look, since there are several explanations out there and who's to say who is right?

As we learn as schoolchildren, America was named in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, for his discovery of the mainland of the New World, but it is Colombus who gets the honor of 'discovering America'.

It is now universally recognized that neither Vespucci nor Columbus "discovered" America. They were of course preceded by the pre-historic Asian forebears of Native Americans, who migrated across some ice-bridge in the Bering Straits or over the stepping stones of the Aleutian Islands.

But putting the 'first inhabitants' aside, there are records of Scandinavian expeditions to America found in ther sagas (their historic cores encrusted with additions made by every storyteller who had ever repeated them). The Icelandic Saga of Eric the Red, the settler of Greenland, which tells how Eric's son Leif came to Vinland, was first written down in the second half of the 13th century, 250 years after Leif found a western land full of "wheatfields and vines"; from this history emerged a fanciful theory in 1930 that the origin of "America" is Scandinavian: Amt meaning "district" plus Eric, to form Amteric, or the Land of (Leif) Eric.

Other Norsemen went out to the land Leif had discovered; in fact, contemporary advocates of the Norse connection claim that from around the beginning of the 11th century, North Atlantic sailors called this place Ommerike (oh-MEH-ric-eh), an Old Norse word meaning "farthest outland." (This theory is currently being promoted by white supremacists of the so-called Christian Party, who are intent on preserving the nation's Nordic character, and who argue that the Norse Ommerike derives from the Gothic Amalric, which, according to them, means "Kingdom of Heaven.") But most non-Scandinavians were ignorant of these sailors' bold exploits until the 17th century, and what they actually found was not seriously discussed by European geographers until the 18th century. Further, other discoveries of America have been credited to the Irish who had sailed to a land they called Iargalon, the land beyond the sunset, and to the Phoenicians who purportedly came here before the Norse. The 1497 voyage by John Cabot to the Labrador coast of Newfoundland constitutes yet another discovery of the American mainland, which led to an early 20th-century account of the naming of America, recently revived, that claims the New World was named after an Englishman (Welshman, actually) called Richard Amerike.

Vespucci not only explored unknown regions but also invented a system of computing exact longitude and arrived at a figure computing the earth's equational circumference only fifty miles short of the correct measurement. It was, however, not his many solid accomplishments but an apparent error made by a group of scholars living in St. Dié, near Strasbourg, France, in the mountains of Lorraine, then part of Germany, that led America to be named (ostensibly) after him; and this is largely why his reputation has suffered. His published letters had fallen into the hands of these German scholars, among whom was the young cartographer Martin Waldseemüller.

Inspired to publish a new geography that would embrace the New World, the group collectively authored a revision of Ptolemy, which included a Latin translation of Vespucci's purported letter to Soderini, as well as a new map of the world drawn by Waldseemüller.

In their resulting Cosmographiae Introductio, printed on April 25, 1507, appear these famous words (as translated from the original Latin; see below) written most likely by one of the two poet-scholars involved in the project:

"But now these parts [Europe, Asia and Africa, the three continents of the Ptolemaic geography] have been extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Americus Vespuccius [a Latin form of Vespucci's name], as will be seen in the appendix: 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, [and so to name it] Amerige, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women"

Columbus clearly made a monumental discovery in showing Europe how to sail across the Atlantic in 1492; Vespucci's great contribution was to tell Europe that the land Columbus had found was not Asia but a New World (and that a western route to Asia involved yet another ocean beyond it).

Yes, he thought he was in India, which is how the West Indies got their name, and is why native americans were called Indians.

Columbus didn't name America, it was named after another explorer called Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of Venezuela. His name was given to the continent by a German cartographer called Martin Waldseemuller.

no he set off knowen there was new land out there. i think the name came from his girl friend..

I think he came up with America as he was planning for the next place he found to be called Bmerica. He enjoyed his Rum on Ship, so who knows if it was a mistake when he found America.