This expedition was placed under the command of Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine astronomer and navigator, who had already made two voyages for Spain and skirted the coast of Yucatan and the northern continent, around Florida, as far north as the Chesapeake. Setting sail now to the south, he made a systematic examination of the Brazilian coast for two thousand miles. All he found that seemed to have any immediate commercial value were immense quantities of a dyewood known in Europe as “_brazil_” (the color of fire); it was from this, of course, that the country took its name. The Portuguese, being by that time, however, too engrossed in their African mines and sugar plantations and East Indian trade to think it worth while to found colonies in such a region, did nothing to develop it until thirty years had passed by and it became necessary for them to protect their rights, particularly from the French, who had been tempted by the great demand for the dyewood to engage in coastwise poaching on a large scale. For this reason, to his contemporaries, the most interesting feature of Vespucci’s report was the conviction he expressed that this country south of the equator was neither Asia nor an island, _but a new continent_, or, as he himself called it, a “new world”—“for it transcends the ideas of the ancients,” he said in a letter to his friend Soderini, “since most of them declare that, beyond the equator to the south, there is no continent but only the sea which they call the Atlantic; but this last voyage of mine has proved that this opinion of theirs is erroneous, because in these southern regions I have found a continent more thickly inhabited by peoples and animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa, and, moreover, a climate more temperate and agreeable than any known to us.” In 1504 this letter was published under the title “_Mundus Novus_.” The term “new world” caught the popular fancy, and although, in 1497, Columbus first of all, and later Vespucci himself with Alonso de Ojeda, had cruised along and touched at points on its Caribbean coast, by virtue of his Brazilian explorations Vespucci was acclaimed the discoverer.