(1454-1512)

 Around 1501-1502, the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci embarked on a follow-up expedition to Cabral’s, exploring the Brazilian coast.

As a result of this voyage, Vespucci demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies were not the eastern outskirts of Asia – as Columbus had thought – but a separate continent, which became described as the “New World”.

The German geographer Martin Waldseemüller was so impressed that he coined the name “America”, after the Latin version of Vespucci’s first name, in a 1507 map.

Waldseemüller later changed his mind and removed the name in 1513, believing that it was Columbus who discovered the New World. However it was too late, and the name stuck.