History of New World in Timeline

1455

The Venetian explorer Alvise Cadamosto used the term "un altro mondo" ("another world") to refer to sub-Saharan Africa, which he explored in 1455 and 1456 on behalf of the Portuguese. This was merely a literary flourish, not a suggestion of a new "fourth" part of the world. Cadamosto was aware that sub-Saharan Africa was part of the African continent.

May 1493

Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, an Italian chronicler at the service of Spain, doubted Christopher Columbus's claims to have reached East Asia ("the Indies"), and consequently came up with alternative names to refer to them. Only a few weeks after Columbus's return from his first voyage, Martyr wrote letters referring to Columbus's discovered lands as the "western antipodes" ("antipodibus occiduis", letter of 14 May 1493), and the "new hemisphere of the earth" ("novo terrarum hemisphaerio", 13 September 1493).

November 1493

In a letter dated 1 November 1493, he refers to Columbus as the "discoverer of the new globe" ("Colonus ille novi orbis repertor"). A year later, on 20 October 1494, Peter Martyr again refers to the marvels of the New Globe ("Novo Orbe") and the "Western Hemisphere" ("ab occidente hemisphero").

August 1501

According to Mundus Novus, Vespucci arrived in Brazil in August 1501 . He compared the nature and people of the place with what Portuguese sailors told him about Asia, and realised he was in a new world. A chance meeting between two different expeditions occurred at the watering stop at Bezeguiche in present-day Dakar, Senegal, as Vespucci was on his expedition to chart the coast of newly discovered Brazil and the ships of the Second Portuguese India armada, commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, were returning from India.

1503

The term "New World" (Mundus Novus) was coined in Spring 1503 by Amerigo Vespucci in a letter written to his friend and former patron Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de' Medici, which was published in Latin in 1503–04 under the title Mundus Novus. Vespucci's letter contains the first explicit articulation in print of the hypothesis that the lands discovered by European navigators to the west were not the edges of Asia, as asserted by Christopher Columbus, but rather an entirely different continent that represented a "New World".

1505

A 1504 globe, possibly created by Leonardo da Vinci, depicts the New World as only South America, excluding North America and Central America. A conference of navigators known as Junta de Navegantes was assembled by the Spanish monarchs at Toro in 1505 and continued at Burgos in 1508 to digest all existing information about the Indies, come to an agreement on what had been discovered, and set out the future goals of Spanish exploration. Amerigo Vespucci attended both conferences, and seems to have had an outsized influence on them—at Burgos, he ended up being appointed the first piloto mayor, the chief of the navigation of Spain.

1506

The Vespucci passage above applied the "New World" label to merely the continental landmass of South America. At the time, most of the continent of North America was not yet discovered, and Vespucci's comments did not eliminate the possibility that the islands of the Antilles discovered earlier by Christopher Columbus might still be the eastern edges of Asia, as Columbus continued to insist until his death in 1506.

1511

Peter Martyr, who had been writing and circulating private letters commenting on Columbus's discoveries since 1493, often shares credit with Vespucci for designating the Americas as a new world. Peter Martyr used the term Orbe Novo, meaning "New Globe", in the title of his history of the discovery of the Americas, which began appearing in 1511.

1513

The western coast of the New World, including the Pacific Ocean, was discovered in 1513 by Vasco Núñez de Balboa, twenty years after Columbus' initial voyage. It was a few more years before the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan's between 1519 and 1522 determined that the Pacific Ocean definitely formed a single large body of water that separates Asia from the Americas. Several years later, the Pacific Coast of North America was mapped. The discovery of the Bering Straits in the early 18th century, established that Asia and North America were not connected by land. But some European maps of the 16th century, including the 1533 Johannes Schöner globe, still continued to depict North America as connected by a land bridge to Asia.

1524

In 1524, the term "New World" was used by Giovanni da Verrazzano in a record of his voyage that year along the Atlantic coast of North America in what is present-day Canada and the United States.