Is there an alternate timeline where America is known as the United States of the Pickle-Dealer? It seems unlikely, but there’s an element of truth to this half-sour hypothetical. Amerigo Vespucci didn’t discover the Americas, contrary to what the map-makers who named the continents believed, but his given name did end up lending itself to the so-called “new world.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson once called Vespucci “the pickle-dealer at Seville,” a derisive label that may have stretched the truth a bit, but pointed towards a very real part of the itinerant Italian’s biography.
Before traveling to the New World himself, Vespucci worked as a ship chandler—someone who sold supplies to seafaring merchants and explorers. These supplies included foods like meat, fish, and vegetables that had been pickled, which meant they would stay preserved beneath a ship’s deck for months. Without pickling, expeditions had to rely on dried foods and ingredients with naturally long shelf lives for sustenance. Much of the time, this limited diet wasn’t enough to provide crewmembers the nutrition they needed for the journey ahead. This made pickle sellers like Vespucci indispensable during the golden age of exploration. Vespucci even supplied Christopher Columbus’s later voyages across the Atlantic with his briny goods. So while he wasn’t the world’s most important explorer, Vespucci’s pickles may have changed history by preventing untold bouts of scurvy.
