Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci's Discovery of America

What caused renaissance geographers in 1507 to name the newly discovered continent America, in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, instead of, say, Columbia? The six letters of Vespucci, published in Letters From a New World, convinced Europe of the momentous truth that earlier had eluded Columbus - Columbus had not reached Asia, but a New World, a new continent between Europe and Asia that would bear the name of America. Vespucci's reports contain the astonished and bewildered observations of a man who first made sense of places and things that were, at the time, unimaginable. While Vespucci's voyages are not legendary, his reports of the New World are.