Columbus "discovered" the two major continents of the Western Hemisphere so why don't we live in North Columbia? Why isn't it the United States of Columbia? Why aren't we Columbians?

This is why:

A DECADE AGO, the Library of Congress paid $10 million to acquire the only known original copy of a 1507 world map that has been called “the birth certificate of America.” The large map, a masterpiece of woodblock printing, has been a star attraction at the library ever since and the object of revived scholarly fascination about the earliest cartography of the New World. The research has also rescued from obscurity a little-known Renaissance man, the 16th-century globe maker Johannes Schöner, who was responsible for saving the map for posterity.

We call ourselves Americans today because of the map’s makers, Martin Waldseemüller and Mathias Ringmann, young clerics in the cathedral village of St.-Dié, France. By incorporating early New World discoveries, their map reached beyond the canonical descriptions of Old World geography handed down from Ptolemy in the second century. On a lower stretch of the southern continent, the mapmakers inscribed the name “America” in the mistaken belief that Amerigo Vespucci, not Columbus, deserved credit for first sighting a part of that continent, South America.
Interestingly there's this:

The map is also the source of an abiding mystery. How did Waldseemüller and Ringmann already know so well the configuration of South America, before any recorded Spanish or Portuguese voyages around the horn to the west coast? How did they know of the Pacific before Balboa made his sighting in 1513? Hard to believe it was just a guess or futuristic vision of what world geography would come to be.

Were the cartographers themselves dropping a hint when they wrote on the map that “if you are not familiar with the new discoveries, do not be afraid of what it is you see on this map, for it is how you will come to see your world in the future”?


Why America Is Called America