Earliest map to show America made north of the Alps.
The map of the Globus Mundi (Strassburg, 1509) has some significance as being the earliest issued north of the Alps, recording both the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries; though it merely gives the projecting angle of the South American coast as representing the developments of the west.
English references to America.
Richard Eden.
It is doubtful if any reference to the new discoveries had appeared in English literature before Alexander Barclay produced in 1509 a translation of Brant's Ship of Fools, and for a few years there were only chance references which made no impression on the literary instincts of the time. It was not till after the middle of the century, in 1553, that Richard Eden, translating a section of Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia, published it in London as a Treatyse of the newe India, and English-reading people first saw a considerable account of what the rest of Europe had been doing in contrast with the English maritime apathy. Two years later (1555), Eden, drawing this time upon Peter Martyr, did much in his Decades of the Newe World to enlarge the English conceptions.
The naming of America.
But the most striking and significant of all the literary movements which grew out of the new oceanic developments was that which gave a name to the New World, and has left a continent, which Columbus unwittingly found, the monument of another's fame.
1504. September. Letter of Vespucius.
It was in September, 1504, that Vespucius, remembering an old schoolmate in Florence, Piero Soderini, who was then the perpetual Gonfalonière of that city, took what it is supposed he had written out at length concerning his experiences in the New World, and made an abstract of it in Italian. Dating this on the 4th of that month, he dispatched it to Italy. It is a question whether the original of this abridged text of Vespucius is now known, though Varnhagen, with a confidence few scholars have shared, has claimed such authenticity for a text which he has printed.