In 1527 Henry VIII sent two ships under the command of John Rut to explore the North-American coast, and Captain Rut seems to have reached the Straits of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador (then blocked with ice so that he took them for a bay), and afterwards to have passed along the east coast of Newfoundland--already much frequented by the Bretons, Normans, and Portuguese--and to have stopped at the harbour of St.John's, thence sailing as far south as Massachusetts.
[Footnote 9: The name _America_ probably appears for the first time in English print in the old play or masque the _Four Elements_, which was published about 1518.

In a review of the geography of the Earth, as known at that period, a description is given of this vast New World across the Ocean: "But these new landys found lately, been called America, because only Americus did find them first".

Americus was a Florentine bank clerk--Amerigo Vespucci--at Seville who gave up the counting-house for adventure, sailed with a Spanish captain to the West Indies and the mainland of Venezuela (off which he notes that he met an English sailing vessel, and this as early as 1499!), and then joined the first exploring voyage of the Portuguese to Brazil.

He returned to Europe, and in a letter to a fellow countryman at Paris, written in the late autumn of 1502, he claimed to have discovered a New World across the Ocean.

His clear statement about what was really the South American Continent aroused so much enthusiasm in civilized Europe that five years afterwards the New World was called after him by a German printer (Walzmueller) at the little Alsatian University of St.Die.By 1518 the English writers and mariners were probably aware that the discoveries of Cabot, Columbus, and the Portuguese indicated the extension of "America" from the Arctic to the Antarctic, but not till about 1553 did the scholars and adventurers of England show themselves fully alive to the gigantic importance of this New World.
Between 1530 and 1553 their attention was distracted from geography and over-sea adventure by the religious troubles of the Reformation.] The Portuguese monarchy had begun to take possession of the Azores archipelago from the year 1432.