Did Christopher Columbus really Discover America?
No Columbus’s voyage of 1492 wasn’t intended to discover a new continent but to prove that Asia was much closer than anyone imagined. He was wrong. Columbus never actually set foot on mainland America. The closest he came was the Bahamas (Probably the small island of Plana Cays) – but made his crew swear an oath that if asked, they would say they’d reached India. He died in Valladolid in 1506 and remained convinced to the end that he’d reached the coast of Asia. America is named after not the Italain merchance and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second translantic voyage of John Cabot – the English name of the Italian Giovanni Cabotto whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the British claim to Canada. It is believed that the Chinese passed by America centuries before Columbus was even born and even then, the Vikings would have a good claim upon it.
Depends on how you look at it. He wasn’t the first to get there by any strech of the imagination, the Vikings were the first Europeans there, but the Chinese landed in California much before the Vikings. The Chinese also realized that it was a new land that no one had been to before, but all they wanted to do was explore, they had no desires to colonize. I doubt they called it America though, because America comes from Amerigo Vespuci, who was the first European who realized that it was 2 entirely new continents. The Vikings just thought that they landed on large islands (like Greenland or Iceland). So if you want to be anal about it Amerigo discoverd America, because he realized that there were 2 continents, and not islands off of India (like Columbus thought), or large islands in the Arctic Ocean (like the Vikings thought), or just another hunk of rock with no significance other that the fact that it was there (like how the Chinese thought).
no he did not discover america Amerigo Vespucci discovered america Amerigo Vespucci (March 9, 1454 – February 22, 1512) was an Italian merchant, explorer and cartographer. He played a senior role in two voyages which explored the east coast of South America between 1499 and 1502. On the second of these voyages he discovered that South America extended much further south than previously known by Europeans. This convinced him that this land was part of a new continent, a bold contention at a time when other European explorers crossing the Atlantic Ocean thought they were reaching Asia. Statue at the Uffizi, Florence Statue at the Uffizi, Florence Vespucci’s voyages became widely known in Europe after two accounts attributed to him were published between 1502 and 1504.[1] In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the new continent “America” after Vespucci’s first name, Amerigo. In an accompanying book, Waldseemüller published one of the Vespucci accounts, which
