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the Gulf of Urabá. When the ship landed, the
colony was in such danger of perishing from
starvation and Indian attacks that its leader,
Martín de Enciso, accepted the stowaway’s
advice and moved to a safer location at the
Indian village on the gulf’s western shore that
Balboa had spotted while sailing with Basti-
das. The new colony was named Santa María
la Antigua de Darién. Within a short time,
leadership conflicts resulted in Balboa’s being
appointed governor by the colonists.
Balboa was brutal to Indians who resisted
Spanish advances into the interior, but he pre-
ferred to forge close ties with friendlier tribes.
He married the daughter of an Indian leader
named Chima and helped Chima’s people fight
a war against their enemies. According to con-
temporary historian Peter Martyr, the Indians
gave gold to the Spaniards for their help. When
an argument broke out among the Spaniards
over how large a share should be sent to the
king of Spain, one Indian prince was revolted.
“What is the matter, you Christian men,
that you so greatly esteem so little portion of
gold more than your own quietness [calm-
ness],” said the prince angrily. “I will show you
a region flowing with gold, where you may sat-
isfy your ravening appetites.” This region, the
Spaniards were told, lay to the west, over the
mountains of central Panama, from which a
large sea could be seen.
All the Spaniards sought gold, but Balboa
had an extraincentive. His appointment as
colonial leader was unofficial in the eyes of(^44) B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–1800
Naming America =
One person who accepted Amerigo Vespucci’s claims was Martin Wald-
seemüller, a cartographer and geographer at the French monastery of St-Dié. In
1507 Waldseemüller published and sold 1,000 copies of a large woodcut map,
entitled “Map of the World According to the Traditions of Ptolemy and Americus
Vespucius.”
By depicting the Caribbean and the eastern coastlines of the Western Hemi-
sphere as distinct and separate from Asia, the map further strengthened the
European concept of these lands as belonging to a “New World,” not an exten-
sion of China as Columbus and others had hoped. Waldseemüller depicted the
northern and southern continents of the hemisphere separately. The southern
portion—depicting what is now called South America—was accompanied by a
large portrait of Vespucci, emblazoned with his name. Waldseemüller sug-
gested in an accompanying book that “since another... part [of the world] has
been discovered by Americus Vesputius, I do not see why anyone should object
to its being called after Americus the Discoverer, aman of natural wisdom, Land
of Americus or America.”
Waldseemüller stopped using the name Americain his later maps, perhaps
to correct his mistake in overcrediting Vespucci. By then, however, the 1507
map was used throughout Europe. The matter was unofficially decided in 1538,
when influential Belgian cartographer Gerard Mercator published a map divid-
ing the New World into “North America” and “South America.”
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