So do salesmanship and sorcery. Amerigo Vespucci was both hero and villain—but I expect readers of this book already know that. My purpose is to show that he was also both salesman and sorcerer. He was a merchant who became a magus. This book tells the story of how that strange mutation happened and tries to help readers understand why.

By 1502, the Florentine merchant and explorer Amerigo Vespucci had figured out that Columbus was wrong, and word of a New World had spread throughout Europe. America was later named for Vespucci. And, as researchers now recognize, neither man was actually the first to discover the Americas. There were, of course, the natives already here.

America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who set forth the then revolutionary concept that the lands that Christopher Columbus sailed to in 1492 were part of a separate continent. A map created in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller was the first to depict this new continent with the name "America," a Latinized version of "Amerigo."

The stereotype of Native Americans as “savages”, noble or otherwise, comes from Columbus and Vespucci. The people they saw were hardly what the West would now call “primitives” or hunter-gatherers. They were farmers. They had towns. Instead they seemed “savage” because they were seen through a Eurocentric deficiency model.