The discovery of the New World by those from the Old World unleashed perhaps the most significant migrations of humanity ever experienced in either world. While Christopher Columbus may or may not have been the first European explorer to reach the Americas, his journals led Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci to recognize that Columbus had indeed traveled to a previously unknown continent, a new world. Vespucci wrote about his conviction that Columbus had achieved this feat in his treatise, Mundus Novus, the inspiration for 1492: Mundus Novus.