The naming of America – Redux

This is a brief addenda to my previous naming of America post, as my copy of Peter Macdonald’s Cabot & The Naming of America: Dawn of Arrival, Newfoundland, June 1497 has finally arrived; remaindered, it cost all of £0.01! (p&p £4!).

As I suspected the book is self-published by the author, always a bad sign for a history book, and it lives down to expectations. Macdonald’s arguments in favour of the Ap Meric (Amerike) theories are even worse than those of Rodney Broome and are centred on a straightforward lie. On the second, unnumbered, page Macdonald writes:

In 1507 a cartographer by the name of Waldseemuller [sic] (meaning the miller from the forest sea [it’s actually wood lake]) produced a map in which he attributed the name of the place he had heard called America to Amerigo Vespucci. People assumed that he had got his facts right and that from this slender beginning grew the legend. However, it is more than probable that the miller man gave the credit to the wrong person. It is far more likely that the great continent was named after Richard Amerike, the King’s Customs Officer for Bristol in 1497, as will become evident in this book, and that Herr Waldseemuller’s was a shot in the dark that hit the wrong target.

As is very clear from the passages from the Cosmographiae Introductio, that I quoted in my previous post, Ringmann, its author, states that he and Waldseemüller had not attributed the name of the place he had heard called America to Amerigo Vespucci but believing Vespucci to be the discoverer of the new territories and coined the name themselves in his honour. Macdonald repeats this deliberate lie again on page 35:

In 1507 a young geographer who lived in Freiburg [St Dié actually], Martin Waldseemuller by name, drew a map of the new continent and gave it the name ‘America’. Because he knew that Amerigo Vespucci had accompanied Hojeda he assumed the name America, by which the place was beginning to be known, referred to him.

Naturally, Macdonald doesn’t quote a single occurrence of the name ‘America’ before it was coined by Ringmann and Waldseemüller in 1507.

An impression of Macdonald’s abilities as a historian can be gained from the following introductory paragraph on page 3. A warning to all serious medieval historians you might feel offended by Macdonald’s description of the late fifteenth-century. On the other hand you might fall about laughing.

It is difficult, today, to imagine just how ignorant people were five hundred years ago; they knew nothing about almost everything. They had no idea how their bodies worked – no idea why they breathed, urinated, defecated or felt hungry, felt sick or had a temperature – and many made no connection between the sexual act and childbirth. They knew nothing of geography – indeed most people didn’t know or care what went on on the other side of the horizon – and they thought the world was flat [my emphasis]. Nearly everyone was illiterate, even kings; only a few of the clergy knew how to read and write.