Naming a New Continent

After Christopher Columbus discovered America - yes, we know that Leif Ericson discovered it 500 years earlier, but Columbus's discovery is the one that stuck - the continents of North America and South America, in addition to the islands that surrounded them and isthmus of Central America, quickly attracted attention, explorers, businessmen and settlers. This land, the object of such fascination, was simply called "The New World."

Eventually it would need a name, although some parts of it would continue under such non-names as 'Newfoundland'.

Many history students are familiar with the fact that America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer, cartographer, navigator, and financier who did much to lead the way toward a more accurate knowledge of American geography. His voyages to the Caribbean Sea, and to the Atlantic coast of South America paved the way for the further exploration of the Americas, and eventually, long afterward, the settling and civilizing of the Americas. The data he collected was important for mapmaking.

But who named America?

America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, but it was named by two German cartographers, Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller.

Matthias Ringmann was a poet and grammarian. In addition to writing about the rules of grammar, about ancient authors, and his own original texts, he was a friend of Martin Waldseemüller. Ringmann was something of a cartographer, and credited Amerigo Vespucci with making an important advance, inasmuch as he journeyed further south than the Caribbean region initially explored by Columbus. Waldseemüller and Ringmann together published, in 1507, a new edition of an old book, Ptolemy's geography book, along with newer material written by Ringmann and Waldseemüller. In writing the introduction to that book, Ringmann was the first author to print and publish the word 'America'. He spent much of his life in or near Lorraine (more properly called 'Lothringen').

Martin Waldseemüller did more of the cartography and less composing of text; his maps were the first to use 'America'. He spent much of his life in or near Freiburg.

While the Spaniards and Portuguese were the first wave of explorers in the New World, the German cartographers were known for producing the most detailed and precise maps. And so it was a team of two German mapmakers who named America after an Italian!

What Columbus Brought Home from America

Although one sometimes reads about the devastation caused among the Native Americans ("Indians") by diseases brought to the New World from Europe, it is also true that there were many deadly diseases in America before European explorers arrived here. Syphilis, in particular, was killing mass numbers of Native Americans in waves of infection which rolled from North America to South America and back again.

Given that this disease is spread by behavior forms which are, with rare exceptions, voluntary, certain demographic segments among the Native Americans were safe from the illness. Nonetheless, the death toll was large, preventing some tribes from stabilizing at more advanced levels of civilization, forcing other tribes back to lower levels, and nearly exterminating still other tribes.

Christopher Columbus, of course, knew nothing of this. He did not realize that he was entering into a dangerous area when, in 1492, he first made contact with the Native Americans. Other people in Europe, however, soon realized what the "Indians" had given to Columbus: a deadly disease. At first, scientists disputed whether syphilis, which soon killed large numbers of people in Europe, had actually come from North America. Some thought it came from another part of the world; others thought that it had been in Europe, unrecognized, all along. But in January 2008, Scientific American magazine wrote that

the Italian adventurer and some of his crew contracted the disease during their voyage to the New World — and unwittingly introduced it to the old one circa 1493.

If, in fact, this is true, then we have evidence that Columbus's men, or perhaps even Columbus himself, engaged in the wrong type of activity. Certainly, neither the captain nor his crew were properly married to any of the Native Americans! Not only did they pay the price for their unwise judgment, but others in Europe may have paid the price as well, when the crew returned to the Iberian Peninsula.

Researchers from Emory University in Atlanta report in the online journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases that they used phylogenetics — the study of the evolutionary link between organisms — to study 26 geographically scattered strains of a family of bacteria known as Treponemes, which are behind the sexually transmitted disease syphilis as well as related nonvenereal infections such as yaws. They found that the venereal syphilis-causing strains arose relatively recently in humans and are closely related to an ancient infection isolated in South America that gives rise to yaws.

In other words, the strains of syphilis which spread across Europe descended from Native American bacteria.

"That supports the hypothesis that syphilis — or some progenitor — came from the New World," said lead study author Kristin Harper, an Emory molecular genetics researcher.

Although the new evidence is persuasive, suggestive, and convincing, the case is still not entirely closed. It is conceivably possible, although unlikely and unimaginable, that syphilis did not come to Europe from America.

According to the researchers, the origin of syphilis has been hotly debated since the first recorded epidemic of the disease in Europe in 1495. Most of the scientific evidence in recent years had been gleaned from the bones of members of past civilizations in both the Old and New worlds; bones were considered credible markers since chronic syphilis causes skeletal lesions. But skeletal analysis was hobbled by an inability to accurately determine bone age and a lack of supporting epidemiological evidence.

Another piece of evidence is the pattern of narratives among the Native Americans about epidemics which swept through the Americas before any European explorers arrived.

Scientists say the study is significant because of the large number of strains analyzed, including two species of yaws found in isolated inhabitants of Guyana in South America.

We have, then, another example of the - unintended - results of Europe's discovery of America. Along with tobacco, syphilis was part of the wave of death unleashed not only upon Europe, but the rest of the world, as the misery in which the American "Indians" had long lived escaped into the other continents. Disease and tobacco, along with various plants having hallucinogenic and narcotic effects, may explain the otherwise unexplained fall of significant Native American civilizations before the arrival of Europeans. Unknown to the Europe, to Asia, or to Africa, Native Americans had been living for centuries in a nightmare of epidemics, tobacco-related deaths, and the effects of mood-altering addictive plants.