Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) generally gets credit for finding America. In grade school, many of us learned this ditty: In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And he did. On his first voyage, he sighted the Bahamas and made land on Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). On three subsequent voyages (1493, 1498, 1502), he also explored the coast of South America. But Columbus never realized that he had sailed to the New World. He died in 1506, blissfully certain that he had reached Asia. An Italian, Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), working in Spain for the Medici family, helped outfit the ships for Columbus’s first voyage. He wrote, “Perhaps there is a continent or a very large country