America's Oldest Birth Certificate: An Over 500-year old Hidden Treasure

In a forgotten corner of a New York library sits America’s oldest cartographic birth certificate, dating from c. 1508. Washington’s epic $10 million Waldseemüller woodcut map, (not an original but a 1516 reprint on used paper) is painstakingly dethroned. In a watershed reappraisal of an intricate world gore map from Albi, hometown of and attributed to Louis Boulengier, a scale equal to the Da Vinci Globe dating from 1504, the reader is brought into archives across the world. The Belgian RGS Fellow and Professor, who lives in Austria, proves that the habits of the American genus, described by Amerigo Vespucci, prompted the young French poet, M. Ringmann, in March of 1507 to change “Americi” for America. D.N. Germanus, a Benedictine runaway monk, globemaker in 1477 for the Vatican, is found to be the mastermind behind the copper engraving to alleviate the work of scholars. For all interested in the discovery and naming of America, this historic milestone is an eyeopener.