In the 1890s the City Fathers of Bristol, England, were making preparations to commemorate the 400th anniversary of John Cabot’s 1497 voyage from Bristol to Newfoundland that discovered and claimed North America for England.
Historians noticed that one of Bristol’s leading citizens at the time had a name uncannily similar to the name America.
America is almost certainly named after Richard Ameryk, a wealthy aristocratic merchant living in Bristol at the end of the 15th century.
The word America first appeared on a map, written across South America, in Martin Waldseemuller’s World Map published in 1507 in Strasbourg. This was the most authoritative world map of the time, and the first to show the Americas as a separate continent.
Waldseemuller speculated that 'America' was derived from the first name of Amerigo Vespucci. We know from the tentative wording in his publication that this was only an educated guess on his part, and in later editions he did not use the name ever again.
Commercial fishing ships from Bristol were making annual voyages to North America, starting in the 1470s, after they discovered the Grand Banks fishing grounds off of Newfoundland. Richard Ameryk was one of the merchant traders importing ship loads of salted cod-fish from this source.
Ameryk may have financed John Cabot’s ship, the Matthew, and the expedition from Bristol to North America in 1497, which was intended to explore a trade routes to China.
The word America was in use in Bristol in the early 1500s, suggesting it originated there.
The Bristol Basin
Beneath this East River Drive of the City of New York lie stones, bricks
and rubble from the bombed City of Bristol in England ...Brought here in ballast from overseas, these fragments that once were homes shall testify while men love freedom to the resolution and fortitude of the people of Britain.
They saw their homes struck down without warning. It was not their walls
but their valor that kept them free...And broad-based under all is planted England's oaken-hearted mood, as rich in fortitude as e'er went worldward from the island wall. - Stephen Vincent Benet, 1942
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