A Map He Couldn't Read

Columbus underestimated Earth's size by roughly 25 percent, so he expected Japan to appear about where the Caribbean actually is. When he hit land, he forced every sighting to match that wrong map. He reached Cuba and declared it part of China. He touched the coast of South America and decided it was the Garden of Eden.

The continents ended up named for someone else entirely. Amerigo Vespucci, a later navigator, was the first European to argue in print that these were new landmasses, not the eastern edge of Asia. A mapmaker liked that idea, and the name America stuck.