Exploration
In the Pacific Ocean, Jorge de Menezes (c. 1498–?), discovered Papua New Guinea. García Jofre de Loaísa (1490–1526), discovered the Marshall Islands. Explorations of the Americas began with the initial discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), who led a Castilian (Spanish) expedition across the Atlantic, discovering America. After the discovery of America by Columbus, a number of important expeditions were sent out to explore the Western Hemisphere. This included Juan Ponce de León (1474–1521), who discovered and mapped the coast of Florida; Vasco Núñez de Balboa (c. 1475–1519), who was the first European to view the Pacific Ocean from American shores (after crossing the Isthmus of Panama) confirming that America was a separate continent from Asia; Aleixo Garcia (14?–1527), who explored the territories of present-day southern Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, crossing the Chaco and reaching the Andes (near Sucre).
Alfred Hudd
The traditional theory of the naming of America is that it was named in honour of Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator. At the turn of the sixteenth century, Vespucci undertook a series of voyages (the number of which remains unresolved) in search of a western passage to the Indies. After the voyage of 1501–1502, he proposed that the areas that he and, separately, Christopher Columbus had explored were not part of Asia, but rather a New World. America first received its name in the "Cosmographiae Introductio", published by cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1507. Vespucci's published letters (the authenticity of which is contested) were the inspiration for that work, which was authored by a group of scholars in Saint-Dié, Lorraine, France. They revised Ptolemy's "Geography" to include the New World and reasoned that, as the three previously known continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, had feminine names, so should the New World. Accordingly, the feminised version of the Latin form of the baptismal name of the "discoverer" of the New World, Vespucci, was utilised. The appendix of the book included Waldseemüller's map of the world in which the New World was labelled "America." The map, rediscovered in a German castle in 1901, was the first to use the name America and the first to depict a Western Hemisphere. The Library of Congress purchased the 1507 Waldseemüller map in 2003. On 30 April 2007, German Chancellor Angela Merkel transferred the map, also known as America's "birth certificate," to the people of the United States in a ceremony at the Library of Congress.