A few years after his death, Christopher Columbus was nearly forgotten, and the Americas were named after another adventurer Amerigo Vespucci, a native of florence, who visited the americas and wrote in great detail about them. The Americas were called the new world as the relatively less was known about them.
In 1498, a Portuguese sailor Vasco da gama actually managed to find the actual sea route to India from Europe, around the Cape of Good Hope, towards Zanzibar and westward to land in Calicut in present day kerala