In 1507, a German cartographer working from secondhand gossip and a dead man's letters scrawled a single word across an unnamed continent — and accidentally gave America to the wrong person forever. We follow the bizarre chain of misfires, ego, and one catastrophic translation error that turned Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine accountant who never commanded a flagship, into the namesake of two continents while Columbus died convinced he'd reached Asia. It's the story of how a mistake, printed and distributed before anyone could stop it, became too big to correct.