9 March—If Columbus discovered America, why isn’t it—rather, the three Americas—named after him? We can thank Amerigo Vespucci for that. Probably. Some people who think Amerigo isn’t the namesake of the Americas opine that if he were, the Americas would be called the Vespuccias or Vespucias. Imagine that. United States of Vespuccia or Vespucia. U.S.V. indeed.

First things first, then. Christopher Columbus is the brilliant navigator who thought he had landed in India in 1492 when he actually had landed in the Bahamas and never got to set foot on the mainland until his fourth voyage across the Atlantic in 1504, when he made landfall on South and Central America. He never made it up north. He’s thought to have believed till his dying day that he had actually reached the Far East. But he always made it home.

Columbus was born Christoforo Colombo in Genoa when it was a republic. His name was Latinized to Christophorus Columbus and Anglicized to Christopher Columbus. When Columbus moved to Spain, he changed his name to Cristóbol Colón. But he never was a colonial.

John Cabot, sailing for King Henry VII of England in 1497, arguably landed on mainland North America when he put in at Cape Breton and Newfoundland, both islands, but close to mainland Canada.

Cabot was born Giovanni Caboto, probably within a year of Columbus, in Genoa, like Columbus, or in Naples when it was a kingdom, like Enrico Caruso after it became part of Italy three centuries later. In Latin he’d have been Johannes Cabot.

It’s the Cabot connection that gives rise to the Americas being so called. Cabot diligently mapped the land he saw and named it after the principal sponsor of his first voyage, a Welshman thriving in Bristol (a port in England) named Richard Ap Meryk (Son of Meurig)—Anglicized to Amerike or Ameryk. Not impossible. And why not?

So now we come to Amerigo Vespucci. Born within a year of Colombo and Caboto, but in Firenze (Florence) when it was a republic, his name is Latinized to Americus Vespucius, which is how we learned it in grade school. When he was sailing for Spain, he became Américo Vespucio, and Américo Vespúcio when he sailed for Portugal—just one acute accent difference.

No doubt that Christophorus and Johannes had beaten Americus across the Atlantic, but in 1503 and 1505 Vespucius (or a ghostwriter) published two booklets about his travels to what he called Mundus Novus—the New World. In 1507, then, the success of the best-selling New World volumes inspired publisher Martin Waldseemüller, who was also a cartographer (wasn’t everybody back then?) to put the name America on his first ever map of the New World. Other cartographers took it from there, and within three decades the newly discovered land across the Atlantic was known to all and forever as America.

So what? So today is Americus Vespucius’s 573^rd birthday. Richard Ap Meryk’s birth date isn’t known for sure, but it was probably a decade before the Italian sailors’—and possible even 9 March . . .