"America" not used in Spain.
1541. Mercator first applied the name to both North and South America.
It is very clear that in Spain there had been no recognition of the name "America," nor was it ever officially recognized by the Spanish government. Las Casas understood that it had been applied by "foreigners," who had, as he says, "called America what ought to be called Columba." Just what date should attach to this protest of Las Casas is not determinable. If it was later than the gore-map of Mercator in 1541, which was the first, so far as is known, to apply the name to both North and South America, there is certainly good reason for the disquietude of Las Casas. If it was before that, it was because, with the progress of discovery, it had become more and more clear that all parts of the new regions were component parts of an absolutely new continent, upon which the name of the first discoverer of any part of it, main or insular, ought to have been bestowed. That it should be left to "foreign writers," as Las Casas said, to give a name representing a rival interest to a world that Spanish enterprise had made known was no less an indignity to Spain than to her great though adopted Admiral.
Spread of the name in central Europe.
It happens that the suggestion which sprang up in the Vosges worked steadily onward through the whole of central Europe. That it had so successful a propagation is owing, beyond a doubt, as much to the exclusive spirit of the Spanish government in keeping to itself its hydrographical progress as to any other cause. We have seen how the name spread through Germany and Austria. It was taken up by Stobnicza in Poland in 1512, in a Cracow introduction to Ptolemy; and many other of the geographical writers of central and southern Europe adopted the designation. The New Interlude, published in England in 1519, had used it, and towards the middle of the century the fame of Vespucius had occupied England, so far as Sir Thomas More and William Cunningham represent it, to the almost total obscuration of Columbus.
It was but a question of time when Vespucius would be charged with promoting his own glory by borrowing the plumes of Columbus. Whether Las Casas, in what has been quoted, initiated such accusations or not, the account of that writer was in manuscript and could have had but small currency.
1533. Schöner accuses Vespucius of participation in the injustice.
The first accusation in print, so far as has been discovered, came from the German geographer, Johann Schöner, who, having already in his earlier globes adopted the name America, now in a tract called Opusculum Geographicum, which he printed at Nuremberg in 1533, openly charged Vespucius with attaching his own name to a region of India Superior. Two years later, Servetus, while he repeated in his Ptolemy of 1535 the earlier maps bearing the name America, entered in his text a protest against its use by alleging distinctly that Columbus was earlier than Vespucius in finding the new main.
Within a little more than a year from the death of Vespucius, and while the maps assigned to Waldseemüller were pressed on the attention of scholars, the integralness of the great southern continent, to which a name commemorating Americus had been given, was made manifest, or at least probable, by the discovery of Balboa.