... For the story of the naming of America is one we think we know: Amerigo Vespucci, that famously self-promoting explorer, outfoxed not Columbus the discoverer but Columbus the marketer and managed to wheedle his name onto a whole hemisphere of continents he didn’t deserve. “Strange,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, who . . . managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name.” The only problem with this story — one in which America’s name harbors a prophetic seed of self-promotion that later flowers into a full-fledged huckster’s paradise — is its inaccuracy. ...

Waldseemüller [the European map maker who first called America America] seems to have been misled by a document known as the Soderini Letter, a narrative account said to have been by Vespucci but believed by modern scholars to have been forged by unscrupulous publishers. The letter reports that our shores are populated by giants, cannibals and sexually insatiable females — and implies that Vespucci reached this mundus novus pornographicus before that fellow Columbus. Though Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of this year’s excellent “Amerigo,” makes very clear that Vespucci was not above self-promotion, he also argues persuasively that Vespucci had nothing to do with the Soderini Letter, nor therefore the elevation of his name to hemispheric heights. Waldseemüller seems to have later wised to his own credulity, removing “America” and replacing it with “Terra Incognita” on his subsequent maps. Still, he couldn’t erase the path his first map cut through the world: “America” had spread across maps and globes and minds, irreversibly.