The Spanish discoverer of the Gulf was Sebastián de Ocampo, who circumnavigated the island of Cuba in 1508. The Gulf was unnamed until the early 1540s and was considered part of the Atlantic Ocean. The earliest maps referred to the Gulf as Seno Mejicano or Golfo de la Nueva España, but it was named Golfo Mexicano on the 1569 Mercator map.

At that time Spain ruled all the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. But times have changed. Today the U.S. is the overwhelming hegemon in the region, and as such it has the power to do as it wishes, including renaming the Gulf to its liking.

Amerigo Vespucci, a 16^th century Italian merchant and explorer, became a naturalized citizen of Spain in 1505. In 1499 he joined an expedition led by Spanish explorer Alonso de Ojeda that reached the northeastern coast of South America and coastal Brazil. He made extensive observations about the indigenous tribes and the mouth of the Amazon River, which he thought was the Ganges River of India. In 1501, on another voyage, Vespucci sailed along the Brazilian and Argentinian coasts to present-day Rio de Janeiro and the La Plata River. He finally realized that he was not in India or on an undiscovered island but on a separate continent across the Atlantic Ocean, and dubbed the land Mundus Novus, or New World.

In 1507 German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller drew a map of the new continent and named it “Americus” in Vespucci’s honor. This marked the first usage of the name “America.”

The first permanent English colony in America was established in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, 100 years after Waldseemüller’s map and nine years after the death of King Philip II of Spain on September 13, 1598.