Some say Columbus discovered the New World with the help of German-made navigational instruments. Perhaps this was a nationalis tic way of laying claim to at least some of the fame of this discovery, if only vicariously. The fact is that when the major European powers established their colonial empires in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seven teenth centuries, Germany, because of her geographic location in the middle of the continent and due to political division and inner turmoil, was in no position to participate directly in securing for herself a share in the newly discovered parts of the world. This does not mean, however, as we well know, that the Germans were not every bit as curious in and intrigued by what the discoverers had found across the oceans, as the rest of the western world was. Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (1494), a bestseller in its time, was the first literary work to mention the New World, its gold "vnd nacket liit." In 1507 the German humanist and cartographer Martin Waldseemiiller (ca. 1475-1520) used the name America for the first time in his Cosmographiae introductio wrongly assuming that Amerigo Vespucci had discovered the continent. As we gather from Harold Jantz's English translation of the passage in question Waldseemiiller may have used the name in somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion:I do not see why anyone should rightly forbid naming it Amerige, land of Americus as it were, after its discoverer Americus [Vespucci], a man of acute genius, or America, inasmuch as both Europe and Asia have received their names from women.T here were also contemporary German translations of the first accounts of the New World given by Columbus, Vespucci, Pizzaro, and Cortes, and many maps, atlas-like nautical charts and globes produced by German artisans during the first half of the sixteenth century.^ It should be remembered as well that Germans often were also involved in
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