Neue Welt Mundus Novus

While Columbus probably assumed until his death that he had found the sea route to Asia, Amerigo Vespucci held the correct belief that the newly discovered coastal landscapes must be a continent of their own. In his travel reports Mundus Novus and Four Voyages, which have survived in epistolary form and were never challenged during his lifetime, he emphasizes this repeatedly. This was until the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, together with the humanist Matthias Ringmann, published a map of the world in 1507, which included the new continent for the first time and named it "America.".