Germany hands over first-ever map with America to US

May 1, 2007, 1:36 GMT

Washington - German Chancellor Angela Merkel was carrying something other than briefing material with her to Washington this week, as on Monday she handed over a 500-year-old world map naming America as a separate continent for the first time.

The 1507 map by German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller, long feared lost, was rediscovered at the turn of the twentieth century in the castle of a German noble family, which had been holding it unawares for 350 years.

The US Library of Congress has hotly pursued it ever since and succeeded in buying it from Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg in 2001 for 10 million dollars, after the sale was licensed by the German government and state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.

Merkel presented the Library with the map at a ceremony Monday evening in Washington.

The Waldseemueller World Map has been called 'America's birth certificate,' and was mapped out in part from the work of Italian cartographer and explorer Amerigo Verspucci. The continent was named after Amerigo on Waldseemueller's mistaken belief that he was the first to discover it, and not Christopher Columbus.

Vespucci, after a series of voyages to the New World in 1501-1502, was the first to claim that it was a separate continent, with another body of water - the Pacific - on the other side. Columbus famously thought he had reached India.

It is believed about 1,000 editions of Waldseemueller's map were printed and sold, but the one handed over by Merkel on Monday is the last remaining copy.

The Library of Congress plans to put the map on permanent display for the public by the end of this year.