Original spin: how lurid sex fantasies gave us "America." (letters of Amerigo Vespucci)

• Author: Hitt, Jack

When I was in Mrs. Poulnot's third grade class, history was taught in tableaux. Christopher Columbus was forever peering from a gunnel, crying "Land ho!" Amerigo Vespucci was eternally gazing at the stars, sextant in hand.

In the past year, many of us have had the Columbus tableau radically rearranged. Among other things, we now know that he was not the first to spy land. A simple seaman named Rodrigo de Tirana actually had that honor. Now, in my mind's eye, Columbus has stepped back from the bow; I see him down below, writing false log entries, mumbling to God and worrying himself mightily about whether Isabel would cheat him out of his payments- which she did.

Amid all this revision, one figure of this era has gone unexamined. Amerigo Vespucci remains the kindly mapmaker who lent his name to both continents of our hemisphere. I can remember asking Mrs. Poulnot: "What did he do that was so great? Why aren't we the United States of Columbia?" She thumped me on the head with her engagement ring and sent me to the principal's office.

The question still seems a good one to me, and I recently descended into Columbia University's stacks to find an answer. There was, I learned, a precise time and place when Amerigo's name become ours, and in the depths of Butler Library, I found the identity of the obscure man responsible for christening a third of the earth. It turns out that the tableau of Amerigo the mapmaker needs some tinkering, too. The story of our baptism is a glorious chain of mistakes so tawdry and preposterous that it is prophetically American.

Despite the generous treatment he receives in third-grade history books, Amerigo the man was a dweeb. He was born into a family of great prominence and connections in 15th-century Florence (the model for Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" was his cousin, Simonetta). All the advantages of an aristocratic birth notwithstanding, Amerigo was not one of the brighter lights of his class. In fact, he flunked. As was typical in those days and these, his parents procured Amerigo a sinecure, in this case working as a steward for a member of the notorious Italian banking family, Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de Medici.

By the time Columbus raised his sails, Amerigo had worked his way up to a plum posting in Seville, Spain, where he toiled for the Medicis as an accountant. But Amerigo, perhaps looking for a more fulfilling avocation, soon threw himself into collecting maps and books on cosmography and astronomy. Around the turn of the century, he...