Not Columbia, but America!
“I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” – “Proud to be an American” by Lee Greenwood
By consensus, Christopher Columbus is considered the first European explorer to discover the New World (first landing on the Bahamian islands) this week (October 12) in 1492, and yet the two “New World” continents, north and south, were named after another Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who didn’t reach the New World until eight years after Columbus.
Although Columbus was the better navigator, Vespucci was the better, or at least more interesting, diarist – all sea captains back then kept diaries of their travels. While Columbus wrote of the routine of ship life, and the fauna and flora he discovered, Vespucci wrote of the indigenous peoples he discovered, including, apparently, their sex lives, making his diaries more popular than Columbus’s once, as was customary, they were published and sold in book form back in Europe.
One fan of Vespucci’s diaries was a German mapmaker, Martin Waldseemuller, who subsequently published a book that included maps of the two new continents that Vespucci and Columbus had visited. Being unfamiliar with Columbus, Waldseemuller honored Vespucci’s voyages by naming the landmasses North and South America. The name stuck, and the rest is history.
But in deciding what to call their new nation once independence was won, most Americans thought it should be Columbia, and in 1793, the tercentenary of Columbus’ voyage, the United States of Columbia was suggested as the nation’s new name. Of course, there were other suggestions, including “Fredon,” or “Fredonia,” and the people would be called “Fredonians” (the origin of Fredon is unclear, but some have said it means “A gift from God,” while others say it was a mythical land and people). And the simple term “Union” was also widely used in describing the new nation, to signal – albeit overly optimistically – the indivisibility of the people.
Still, Columbia initially was the consensus choice, both because of Columbus but also because the new nation needed a name that had no connection to Great Britain. Also – while seemingly a minor thing – Columbia had the same number of syllables as Britannia, so if native songwriters needed to borrow from the musical scores of traditional English songs in which “Britannia” was a lyric, they could do so without upsetting the song’s rhythm. And having a national anthem all citizens could sing in harmony was both patriotic and unifying.
But in the end, the United States of America became the consensus choice, despite – or perhaps in defiance of – the fact that in the late 18th century the name “Americans” was a derogatory put-down used by the native English to describe their backwater colonial cousins.
Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.