Christopher Columbus reached the American coast first, landing on what today are the Bahamas and sailing down by Cuba and Hispanola. So why do we have only a day for him while the country is named for an Italian explorer? Amerigo Vespucci, born in 1452, was an Italian merchant in charge of shipbuilding for the Medici noble Italian family. Vespucci helped put together Columbus first voyage, and seven years later, with the help of a veteran of Colmbus’s crew, he organized on his own.

On this day, May 10, in 1497 Amerigo Vespucci made landfall in South America, traversing down though modern-day Portugal to within several hundred miles of Tierra del Fuego on the southern the tip of the continent.

Where Columbus thought he had reached India, Vespucci noted the land he was traveling looked nothing like the descriptions of Marco Polo. He calculated out the ship traveled over six thousand miles, three times the distance Columbus thought he sailed. This was not India, Vespucci realized, this was a whole “New World”.